Why does Crystal Lite get moldy? I’ve only noticed it with the peach tea. If it’s left out for just a couple hours, I can smell the mold. If a bit is left in the bottom of a glass over night, it’s black.
I don’t want to give it up if I don’t have to, but I’m not thrilled with the idea of ingesting mold.
Has anyone else noticed this?
What does the mold eat? Crystal Light doesn’t have sugar, and you’d think the flavoring was non-nutritive.
I know! I make sweet tea sometimes. It doesn’t mold as quickly. At first, I thought it was my imagination, but it isn’t.
Crystal Light pink lemonade is my default drink. I leave cups sitting around all the time with a tad in the bottom of the cup or just a cup that hasn’t been rinsed in a long while that previously was filled with the drink.
I’ve never noticed any sort of mold. I think the pink lemonade dries into an odorless white film (evaporates, no doubt).
I do notice that if I leave a half-full pitcher of it in the fridge for a while, I get a pink ring around the pitcher…
Can you be sure it’s mold? Could it be something in the “tea” oxidizing, perhaps? I’ve never noticed this, but I don’t get the peach tea one often.
It grows up the sides of the container. Bleach kills it. The one time hubby forgot to bring it up from the basement, I rinsed the pitcher and the stuff came away in slimey sheets.
It looks and smells like mold.
Hmmm…sure sounds like mold to me. Weird. And this has happened multiple times, with different canisters of powder? How long has it been going on? Maybe you want to contact Crystal Light and send them one of your packages with the manufacture code and all - it’s possible they’ve got a mold problem on the line that makes or packages peach tea at one of their factories, and they don’t know it.
Does Crystal Light contain Splenda? I’ve noticed that when I made a Kool-Aid-type drink with Splenda and leave it sitting in the refrigerator a long time, little spots of something resembling mold grow on the interior of the container.
I can’t find anything online about it, but it seems to me that if microorganisms can metabolize sugar, surely some have evolved to metabolize something very very similar structurally and chemically. Makes sense to me.
Yeah, its amazing where life can take hold. A friend of mine who studied chemistry said they once found some sort of mold or bacteria-like mass growing in a bottle of NaOH. :eek:
I think I have an answer for this question. In fact, I just wrote a blog article about it. The rules on this board seem to permit links, so here it is:
(There is nothing commercial on my blog.)
In short, BEFORE mold starts to develop in the bottles that you use for the Crystal Light, you have to start rinsing the bottles out with vinegar between uses. Vinegar kills mold, but the mold fibers are tenacious and will cling to the inside of the bottle even if they aren’t alive. If you don’t use a bottle for a while, you must store it with a couple ounces of vinegar in the bottom to make sure mold doesn’t grow in any residual crystal light (and moisture) that remains in the bottle. My article explains the whole thing. I’ve been doing this for a couple months now, and it cured the mold problem.
It is still organic stuff even if it is not sugar, and mold can be very versatile. (Mind you, I am surprised to hear that Crystal Light can grow mold, but not, like, shocked.)
It’s not only mold but black mold! Crystal light contains cellulose which is the key food source of black mold!
Crystal light contains cellulose the key food source for black mold. The moisture, cellulose, and darkened interior of the water bottle are perfect environs for black mold!