Starbucks is making a big hoopla about their new instant coffee called VIA which they rolled out nationwide recently. They claim it is an instant coffee that tastes like freshly brewed. They use a proprietary process they are calling a microgrind, and by looking at, making the stuff, and tasting it I'm thinking there's some dehydrated and/or freeze-dried coffee in there too.
Nevertheless, it's VIA VIA VIA everywhere you look inside your local Starbucks right now
Thirsty? How about juice? Or some Gatorade? Water? No thanks, don't be silly, only Vitamin Water for me. Or wait! I know what I'm craving! Mmm, how about some Age Defying Skin Balance Water? That's right, Borba!
According to the website:
"BORBA Age Defying Skin Balance Water contains a revolutionary cultivated bio-vitamin complex...
Caffeine has become so commonplace in our society that I'm starting to think it has become unavoidable. I'm a big-time coffee aficionado (RYO Coffee, Latte Art, (STARBUCKS)RED Whole Bean Coffee) but methinks sometimes marketing "gurus" take it a little too far.
Recently, I counted 14 different flavors of Monster Energy Drink at a Fry's electronic store in a cooler by the registers. Do any of them taste good? Unlikely. Maybe that's why they have to keep cranking out new ones, to keep the public guessing.
Here are some of the latest snacks that have been, shall I say tainted with caffeine:
Butterfinger Buzz...
The German soft drink Bionade is taking the world by storm. I'm not joking. Sales started in 1995 and by 2003 they had sold 2 million bottles. They sold 7 million bottles in 2004, 22 million bottles in 2005, and 70 million bottles in 2006. 2007 sales were well over 200 million bottles.
They are posting 300%+ growth year over year and are the #3 soft drink in Germany after the "Big C" and the "Big P" - the Bionade team is showing up at all the industry trade shows now, and there is even a Bionade Flickr pool; but the question remains, what is Bionade?
There is a somewhat fluffy description about how it is actually made from their website:
"In order to produce a non-alcoholic refreshment drink in a purely organic way, “Mother Nature” has to be out-smarted through her own mechanisms. Under purely natural conditions, alcohol is usually generated during the process of fermentation when sugar is present.
It was only after a long period of research and development that BIONADE’s inventor, the master brewer Dieter Leipold, was successful in converting sugar into gluconic acid during fermentation according to brewing principles. An analogous process can be found in the production of honey by bees.
The Associated Press reports that Austria's health ministry found detectable traces of cocaine samples of Red Bull Cola energy drinks... keep in mind that this is Red Bull's Cola and not their ubiquitous Energy Drink. They use the Coca leaf as a flavoring but are supposed to remove any cocaine.
Before you go out and buy a case, Red Bull Spokeswoman says that any traces are very slight and do not pose a health risk; and the company maintains that its Cola is "harmless and marketable in both the U.S. and Europe."
So how much did they find? - 0.4 micrograms/liter.
To put things in perspective, the EPA allows a maximum threshold of arsenic in drinking water of 10 micrograms/liter. That's 25 times more than how much cocaine the Austrians found.
