Picked up some of those Kool-Aid single serve pakets at the grocery yesterday. They were on sale two-for-one and none of the Crystal Light flavors looked appelaing that day. Reading through the instructions, I find that it is recommended to avoid using sparkling or fluoridated water. Sparkling I can understand since the directions are to add the mix and shake, but why not fluoridated? And, isn’t most tap water fluoridated? Is this some sort of conspiracy by Kool-Aid and bottled water packagers to discourage tap water and increase the sale of bottled water?
I had intended last night to conduct an experiment, mixing up two doses, one with tap water (which I assume is fluoridated) and one with distilled water that’s left over from my dead Sea Monkey tank (unused in the jug, not from the tank itself) but got distracted. I can do that later still when I get home but I really need another person so the taste test is blind.
Oh, I know that and you know that but the mopes who spend money on bottled water don’t.
As if there’s just the one. It is still Kool-Aid after all. It contains: sugar, fructose, citric acid, less than 2% of natural and artificial flavor, ascorbic acid, vitamin E acetate, calcium phosphate, acesulfame potassium and sucralose and then varying degrees of various dyes.
That is weird. I don’t know why they’d say that, particularly as most tap water in the U.S. is flouridated.
However, a taste test using distilled water might not be good evidence. Distilled water is usually described as bad-tasting; you need a few minerals in there (in fact, bottled water that is distilled has small amounts of minerals added back in so it tastes acceptable).
This is kind of a hijack, but after reading that list of ingredients, my number one question is, why does Kool-Aid have sugar AND artificial sweetener in it? Sucralose = Splenda. The number one ingredient is sugar, so why do they have to use sucralose as well?
Ok since we don’t have an actual answer yet, here’s my WAG:
Part I (effect):
Putting “Not recommended for sparkling or fluoridated water” on there is a powerful statement. Most people can figure out the bad things that will happen with sparkling water (Kool-Aid everywhere), and most people know that their tap water is fluoridated. Most people also don’t know which, if any, brands of bottled water are fluoridated. When you think “fluoridated water” you think “tap water”. The effect of this statement will almost certainly direct people towards using this product with bottled water or at least filtered tap water.
The costs to Kraft, on the other hand, are the additional space and ink and answering questions from people like us. Very small.
Part II (motivation):
Aspect A:
Kraft more than likely sells bottled water. In general, increasing bottled water consumption benefits both them and their competitors. Adding “or fluoridated” cost them next to nothing – and these things are sold in large packs (I’ve seen 96-packs of single serving Kool-Aid). Even if this statement drives 0.01% of consumers who read it towards using bottled water instead of tap water for their huge amounts of Kool-Aid, then Kraft will almost definitely break even on the ink and the questions.
Aspect B:
The entire premise of Kool-Aid is sweetened sugar water. Imagine a situation where somebody dislikes the taste of their tap water. The water at my old apartment tasted awful and I didn’t drink it straight, but I did use it for cooking, tea and coffee. For Kraft, “tap water” is a random variable – if it tastes bad and the person still uses it to make Kool-Aid then Kool-Aid might or might not mask the taste – if it doesn’t they’re liable that somebody might dislike the product because their tap water sucks. Now, same argument works for bottled water except for two differences
a) People are a lot less likely to actively buy bottled water that they hate the taste of than having tap water they hate the taste of.
b) People who dislike it with tap water might read the label and blame the fluoride rather than the Kool-Aid. On a second try with bottled water – having now made two purchases to make this beverage – post-purchase rationalization takes over and they like it even if nothing changed.
Besides various factors I can’t account for like peer pressure and effects of advertisement, and personal factors like taste, here’s how my willingness to buy a 24-pack of 12oz bottles of water for $6 breaks down:
a) Product: I think of them as a disposable container, kind of like a ziplock bag that generally doesn’t survive that many uses. As such I’d probably pay $3 or so for 24-pack of empty disposable 12oz water bottles.
b) Service: The rest I’m paying for is the fact that they’re sealed and ready. I’m not paying for the water – I have cheap water coming out of the tap that often tastes better (although I can taste the chlorine). I’m paying for water to be bottled, and sealed. I know they will already be filled and ready when I want to grab one in a hurry. I also know they won’t spill.
c) Alternative: It’s not that I’m lazy, but I’m disorganized – I have water bottles everywhere. So to fill this need without buying bottled water I’d have to pre-fill a whole bunch of containers and leave them everywhere. I’d also need some sort of a marking system to tell if I drank from it already after filling or not – a brand new sealed bottle of water should be fine on the back seat of my car for three months. One that has my saliva and whatever else from my mouth might be fine as well, but I feel that’s yucky. With a seal on the cap I can tell if I’ve taken even a single sip.
d) Culture: I was born in the Soviet Union, and from my very childhood it was instilled into me that tap water is not safe to drink ( this might or might not have been the case in reality, I don’t know ). There was no bottled water so all the water was boiled before drinking. I consciously realize tap water is good here, but I still often catch myself pouring a glass of water from the kettle instead of the tap. I don’t have the same subconscious aversion to bottled tap water because I don’t see it coming out of the tap and the association doesn’t get triggered. The slight chlorine taste is also a trigger (for some reason it’s gone if the water sits for a while, like when cooling after being boiled) – but the chlorine taste might be my imagination.
Well, most of the time it is filtered and has the chlorine and some heavy metals removed (which might be bad for you but impart a bad taste. They then arate it, then place it in those clear plastic bottles, which impart a slight sweet taste to the water. So yes, “bottled” tap water tastes better than just tap water.
You can do the exact same thing by running your tap water through a “Brita” type filter then placing it in clear plastic bottles.
My home tap water is hard as hell and tastes nasty, thus we filter it. However, those rubes up North in SF have some of the nicest tap water in the world, but still drink bottled water.
WAGs: Maybe to make it sweet enough, you’d have to add a lot more sugar, larger than they want those single-serve packs to be. Maybe they don’t want you thinking every single day how much sugar you’re pouring directly into your body. Maybe sugar is more expensive than sucralose and Ace-K (acesulfame potassium), or maybe those two artificial sweeteners are more concentrated than sugar. (This latter one is quite likely considering how tiny those Crystal Light (a no-calorie drink) containers are, versus how much sugar you need to add to the regular Kool-Aid packets that make an equal-sized pitcher.) So the company puts in enough sugar to get that old Kool-Aid taste and sufficiently dilute the color and flavor for use, then adds in the two artificial sweeteners to boost the sweetness.
I have just returned from a trip to the grocery store, and I passed by the flavored drink mix area. Remembering this thread, I took a look at the boxes of Kool-Aid single serve packets. They had four different flavors (I don’t remember what they all were). Of those four, only the grape flavor suggested against BOTH sparkling and fluoridated water, the other three only warned against sparkling. I could not tell you if these were newer or older boxes, of course. It’s a quiet town, but a pretty busy grocery store, so it could go either way.