Capri Sun – Pacific Cooler Review (Plus a rant on raising your children better!)
Yes, the famous pouch
I’ve been feeling a little nostalgic recently, so I bought a box of Capri Sun pouches on my last trip to the store. Growing up in the Eighties and Nineties, these were a familiar sight in lunch boxes and floating around in coolers in summer time. I don’t remember anyone ever saying ‘man, I hate those Capri Sun drinks.’ Let’s reexamine this childhood delight.
First off, the box now proclaims “25% Less Sugar Than Other Leading Juice Drinks” as well as “No Artificial Sweeteners” and “NO high fructose corn syrup.” Each pouch has 16 g of sugar, which is about 21 g of sugar per 8 oz (the pouches used to be bigger, 6.75 oz, but are now 6 oz due to the infamous “grocery shrink ray“). This is a little better than letting your little rugrats suck down superfluous quantities of sugar, but still cannot match Crayons, and particularly Honest Kids in sugar content, and they have a pouch too.
As for the sensory experience, sadly it cannot be easily subjected to my olfactory nerves without squeezing the pouch into a cup, and let’s just face it, I’m a little too lazy for that. As far as the taste goes, it is as pleasantly fruity as I remember, but perhaps a bit more watery. My guess is the 25% less sugar than before. I still enjoyed drinking over half the pouches in the box while I procrastinated on this review, just as I did as a kid.
My overall feelings on this come down to this: yes, it has let sugar than a soda or other fruit drinks, and yes, it’s now sweetened with sugar instead of HFCS, and yes, that pouch is pretty handy, and they have a program (with Terracycle, same as Honest Kids) where you can recycle them and they get turned into purses and pencil carriers, and a few cents get back to the schools. All good points. But. The original line is not 100% juice, has added sugar, and those huge boxes don’t look particularly environmentally friendly. They are also distributed by Kraftfoods in the US, not a small company. The truth is, there are still many better alternatives out there for your kids, most importantly water. THEY SHOULD DRINK WATER. Sweet drinks should be a treat for them, not a daily requirement. I know no one likes anyone to tell them how to raise their children, but seriously, childhood obesity rates are astronomical right now, almost 20%. So toss a bottle of water in that lunchbox, and a juice drink on occasion.
Score: 3 out of 5. A better effort from a behemoth distributor, but still plenty full of sugar and not enough juice.
– WiseGuise
User Reviews: 
(3 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
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