Lipton Tea and Honey

My assessment of the new Lipton Tea and Honey powdered drink mix. A good summer drink for people on the go. But not the super-drink it is cracked up to be.

Companies are always coming up with new products that they hope will take off, and Lipton has been pushing this one pretty hard.

But in a market that is saturated with quasi-healthy over-hyped cold tea drinks, how does it stack up?

Well, I got hold of some samples, so here is my assessment:

Packaging

Tea-based drinks are really being pushed right now because of the perception that they are more healthy. And Lipton is certainly jumping on this bandwagon pushing a powdered drink mixed that is made from honey tea and fruit. The samples I received were the mango/pineapple flavor. The prominent logo on the packaging is "Drink Positive" which is Lipton's new slogan to reflect the natural ingredients and low calorie content (5 calories per sachet).

Like any modern product Lipton Tea & Honey has its own website and Facebook page.

Ingredients

The first ingredient is sugar. So, you know, mostly this is a packet full of sugar and the fact it is from honey does not change that.

I also notice some labeling on the sachet that I consider extremely deceptive. This drink is 5 calories per serving, and a sachet is considered to contain two servings. So there are actually 10 calories per sachet. The sachet contains 3.6 grams, 3.6 grams of pure sugar would be about 14 calories, Koolaid is 12-- so at 10 calories this drink is not much less than that.

Tea is present as green tea powder. This product can have many of the benefits of tea (for example as an antioxidant), depending on how it is harvested and processed. As the third listed ingredient is it not clear how much teas in in each sachet. It is advertised as containing "60 mg of tea flavonoids".

Cherchez the Mango?

The other ingredients are citirc acid, sucralose, dextrin, hibiscus extract and natural flavor (source unspecified). In terms of being the promised "real ingredients" I am not sure how well these fit the bill. Sucrlaose is an artificial sweetener made by chlorinating sugar.

Neither Mango nor Pineapple are in the ingredients at all. This does make me wonder why there i a picture of a mango on the packaging. Okay, I get it is just flavored "like" mango. But I think using an illustration of a fruit that is not an ingredient is a bit misleading.

Taste and Preparation

The packaging does make it easy to carry, but when you tear the sachet as indicated it makes only a tiny hole to pout through.The powder dissolves easily leaving only little specks that seem to be insoluble ingredients of some kind.

The "tea" tasted like a pleasant but extremely sweet fruit punch, similar to Koolaid. The tea flavor is subtle to the point of non-existent. This is an inoffensive summer drink, but nothing special in my opinion. I was hoping for something that tastes more like tea and was subtly sweetened rather than tasting mostly like sugar water.

Lipton Tea and Honey

Conclusion

While it is slightly less sugary that Koolaid, probably due to the use of sucralose, I do not think that this product is accurately described as a "low-calorie iced tea mix" (as it is described in their ad copy and Amazon listing).

At almost $2 per sachet I feel that the customer is paying for the hype more than the product.