Big Lots usually has products that are being put out to pasture - and in this case it is very troubling. Lipton is not normally a company I stand up for, as they are part of Unilever, a huge global-hyper-mega corporation. Like all corporations, they are known for doing works of great evil and works of great accomplishment. In this case, Lipton created a drink of great yumminess - a 'fakey' yummy iced tea treat called Lipton Energize To-Go, which comes in a tart Blueberry flavor and gives out a nice burst of energy too.
Packaging:8
From the outset, you never would really take this powdered tea mix as being really an energy supplement. It looks just like any other tea mix - appealing to pretty much their already established user base. I am sure this would be right there with other Lipton products on the shelf - and unless you were into drinking Crystal Light you would probably not see it.
Overall, it still does a nice job putting all the things you would want to know about what you are drinking, as well as a bunch of reasons to choose this tea over just about any other drink in the world. There are instructions on how to make it, as well as caffeine listing. The package inside is nie too, being easy enough to open, and is durable to last for a couple weeks in a stuffed backpack and not leak.
Taste:9
First, you must understand that I am the kind of guy who empties two or three packages of saccharin into every glass of iced tea i drink. Hot tea is a different story, but sometimes there is nothing better than a crappy black iced tea with a big hunk of bitter bad-for-you sweetness in it. If you can not make a tea out of good healthy and natural ingredients, it is perfectly acceptable to make it out of crappy ingredients and just candify it. I spent many summers chugging down Arizona's blue bottled iced teas, which is about as close to real tea as Coca Cola is to the Kola Nut.
Possibly the craziest part of this drink is that there are these little white seeds floating around in the bottom of my drink. They were not terribly chewy or disgusting, but just strange. The drink mix dissolved well in cold water - although it was almost immediate in hot water.
Lipton Energize tastes like a blueberry candy turned into Kool Aid mix. There is very little difference between this and and fake flavored drink mix in taste. I loved it - in all of its fakey glory - enough at I managed to drink down about eight of these in one work day. It goes down smooth, cool and refreshing. I could easily see summer turning dangerous if these are still around so cheaply around Big Lots.
Buzz:6
You would think with a name like Energize, they would be pushing the energy angle - but turns out not to be the case. Instead, they are pushing all the other stuff in here - mainly something called flavonoids. These are supposedly full of anti-oxidants and drinking them will help rid your body of free radicals - which are supposed to be dangerous for you. Now first of all - as it has been rpoven many many times, getting anti-oxidants or flavonoinds through ingestion is stupid. It just does not work. By the time the food is digested, only 10% or so of all the stuff anti-oxidants are supposed to do actually can get to any organs in your body. "anti-oxidant" is just a buzz word used to sell fruity or tea based drinks - but don't actually have any way of keeping you more healthy.
That being said - this does have some other nice stuff in it for energy. There is a nice boost of caffeine from natural and unnatural sources - 50mg - along with a bunch of vitamin B complex and ginseng too. For being a Lipton product, I am pretty impressed. Yes, there is only 50mg of caffeine in the packet, but it is far too easy to knock back three or four of these in a sitting, giving yourself a great caffeine boost.
For all of the talk of health, it is about as healthy as knocking back a diet soda. It is packed with aspartame, silicon dioxide and food dyes. It neither looks natural, tastes natural or is natural - but none of that matters. Next time I am looking for some cheap tea flavored goodness to knock back on a hot day, there is a good chance I am going to grab one of these from my shelf.
Attribution: Lipton Energize box and bigredboots
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