The current GQ thread Why are there no banana-flavored Pop Tarts? prodded me into asking what has been bugging me lately. Pomegranate has suddenly become a hot flavor. Everything from pomegranate juice to yogurt to. . . you name it.
Why?
Has food science suddenly discovered a way to make a convincing flavor? Are the health benefits suddenly on everyones minds? Have consumer palates always craved pom?
I can’t find an online cite for it, sorry, but I read an article about a year ago in one of those Atlantic/New Yorker type glossy magazines, profiling the biggest pomegranate juice industrialist (a woman IIRC), and they said it was marketing, all marketing. Savvy and shrewd marketing, yah, but just marketing.
They compared it to the current push by the California prune growers association to relabel prunes as “dried plums”–it’s all about branding.
ETA: IIRC further, the gist of the article was that this woman found herself with lots of pomegranates and no real idea what to do with them, so she put on her Madison Avenue thinking cap, and the rest is history.
^Thanks! (or honk, or quack) 
I kind of figured as much. My gf is in advertising, and it all seems to go back to that. I got a latte this morning with a little round sticker that covers the access hole. There used to be a seasonal design on the tiny stickers, but today’s had an Allstate Ad.
I had pom juice once, years ago, before the craze. Bought fresh out of a street market in California.
First sip was okay. Second one, I realized it tasted like highly sugared blood.
Does anyone actually like this stuff?
I do. The secret is in dilution and addition. I dilute pom juice with some carbonated water and add some vodka.
There is always a “hot new flavor” which I think is kind of weird. Somebody comes up with a flavor and every food on the shelf has a variation of it.
Back in the 70’s I wouldn’t have been surprised to see nacho cheese breakfast cereal. In the 80’s it was sour cream and onion. In the 90’s it was kiwi-strawberry.
Why any flavor becomes the fad of the day is what I don’t get. Pomegranates have been around forever. Why wasn’t there anything with it in, say, back in the 50’s? Same with other flavors like kiwi, strawberry, melon, etc. Food scientists just recently discovered them? WTF?
I haven’t had what’s out there now but I like fresh pomegranate a lot. I think the fruit didn’t catch on here because it stains your hands and has a lot of seeds. I guess you can eat them but many prefer to spit them out, which is labor intensive, like sunflower seeds in the shell.
Of course we’ve had grenadine here for a long time but usually it’s in the section with drink mixers and many people don’t know that it’s pom juice. I know it’s on the menu and they’ll order it in cafés in Europe, but I bet they don’t oversugar it like we tend to do here.
Funny, I had a bottle of pomegranate juice a couple of weeks back. It was enjoyable but IMO way overpriced, so it’ll not be a regular with me.
I like grenadine in French-style beer, though it can easily be over-sweet.
I wonder if you could get some grenadine in a bar (pub) supply sort of place for cheaper. The pomegranate is a lot of seeds etc. so naturally, the price of juice is high. But maybe part of the cost is also supply/demand, that it’s a specialty/niche item with a lot of associated costs (keeping a slow-moving item on the shelf, heavy advertising costs, etc.). But the bar stuff has been around a long time and may not suffer from those issues. I’ve had it and find it (Rose’s brand, I think) drinkable, straight, but it may be cloying for some.
If this were the early '90s, the next step would be “Pomegranate Clear!”
They are also riding on the current interest in anti-oxidants that boosted grape juice, red wine, acai berries–which no one had even heard of until recently–etc.
They’re one of the “Super Foods that will Change your Life” too. There was a superfoodsRx label on the bag of spinach I bought the other day, so the idea of superfoods must be pretty common.
As a kid growing up in an Indian household in VA, I used to LOVE it when my parents would bring home a pomegranate as I loved eating the seeds and all, especially chilled. But it was so hard to come by, but they were one of my fav. treats back in the 80’s/early 90’s.
So this sudden Surge of pomegranate products is just PURE awesome for me. I love all things Pomegranate, but that’s because I was used to getting them as a kid, so there’s a huge nostalgic factor there. The only downside is that thanks to the surge this stuff is SO expensive, and you can’t just get a few bottles of it anytime you want … Which leads me to still looking for just the fruit instead of the juice since that’s usually cheaper and i prefer it.
Ro0sh, try a Mexican/Latin American market for fresh. I think they use them for some of their dishes.
ETA: come to think of it I also saw fresh in a Korean market once.
Really? I’ve never seen anyone eat a pomegranate and spit out the seeds. I thought the whole point of the pomegranate was to eat the seeds.
According to Miss Swanson (my first grade teacher), you spit out the seeds. She brought some in for us to try one day and I thought they were mighty tasty. I’ve seen people eat the seeds and I guess they’re small enough that they wouldn’t be much problem. Unless they contain something toxic, why not? Do they add a flavor or are they primarily a texture?
I think this is THE main reason for it’s fad popularity. Pom by itself isn’t a great new flavor that’s being marketed, it’s the fact that it’s a “Super Anit-Oxidant” that they’re selling.
And I don’t know many people who enjoy 100% straight Pom juice by itself. It’s similar to straight cranberry juice and is extremely bitter and dry. It’s usually mixed into some type of berry cocktail or tea.
It’s the anti-oxidants. People think you can mix it with vodka and cigarettes and somehow it will cancel out. They are stupid.
I, for one, had no frickin’ idea. I’ve been drinking Coke or Sprite with grenadine since I was a kid – my grandparents took me to “the club” with them for dinner once, like 25 years ago, and they ordered me a 7-Up with grenadine so I could have a drink of my own while they drowned in their Manhattans. All this time, I thought it was maraschino cherry syrup, since it was red and came from behind the bar somewhere.
The “non-connection” is probably because it’s called grenadine, from the French “grenade,” pomegranate. Another tidbit:
*“small explosive shell,” 1591, from M.Fr. grenade “pomegranate,” from O.Fr. pomegrenate (infl. by Sp. granada), so called because the many-seeded fruit suggested the powder-filled, fragmenting bomb, or from similarities of shape. Grenadiers (1676) originally were soldiers “who were dexterous in flinging hand-granados” [Evelyn], from Fr. grenadier; later “the tallest and finest men in the regiment.” *
I guess you could say that it’s “the bomb?” :smack: :rolleyes: :dubious: