POM is the Bomb!

I was recently sent a sampling of POM Iced Coffees which included 2 of their 3 flavors—Chocolate and Cafe au Lait. Their 3rd flavor is Vanilla, which I’m excited to try. In general, I’m not a huge fan of packaged coffee drinks, as they tend to have this slimy mouth-feel that’s, to put it simply without curse words, wrong. Luckily, neither of the POM Iced Coffees has this strange texture.

(As an aside: My husband and I joke about what ingredient imparts that slimy feel, and he kind-of-but-not-really jokingly mentioned propylene glycol, which is often used in oral pharmaceuticals, cosmetics such as toothpaste and lotion, food colorings, saline solution, coolant, and has a host of other industrial uses (yummy, huh?). Wikipedia lists propylene glycol’s characteristics as faintly sweet, colorless, nearly odorless, clear, and viscous. Viscous = thick, sticky, glutinous, gelatinous, gluey, tacky. Yep, sounds about right. And he could be right, though I have yet to see propylene glycol listed as the exact ingredient. I wonder if it has other names…)

Both coffee drinks had good flavor. The Chocolate was reminiscent of chocolate milk, with a coffee kick, and the Cafe au Lait definitely had strong espresso undertones. All POM’s coffee drinks contain their POMx antioxidant, which is an extract of their pomegranates. Apparently, this antioxidant is more potent than those found in red wine, green tea, and grape and acai extracts! (Which is why POM calls their Iced Coffee the “Healthy Buzz.”) (Oh, yeah, it contains loads of caffeine—175 mg per bottle.) I’d be curious to try their coffee mixes before they added the extract, to see what flavor the extract imparts on the drink… As another plus, POM uses Rainforest Alliance Certified shade-grown coffee beans, hormone free milk, and organic cane sugar. Could it get any better? It can? Oh, yeah—I forgot to mention their cute animated sheep. What, you ask? Check out their website and you’ll see!