Another Talking Head

Ah, the epic battle. Actually it’s not much of a battle. Cplus sucks, and here’s why.

It’s got Benzene! …Or at least it did. Benzene is a carcinogenic chemical that can be formed by the breakdown of two other chemicals sometimes found together in pop: benzoate salts and ascorbic acid. Luckily someone at Health Canada’s got our back.

According to the packaging, Cplus contains 5% real Sunkist fruit juice, aka orange juice. OJ is a well known source of vitamin C. So why is it that the Nutrition Facts reveal that Cplus contains 0% of the recommended daily intake of vitamin C? Which part of the orange juice did they include? Obviously not the nutritious part…

If a 250 ml glass of Tropicana OJ (of which the only ingredient is orange juice) includes 100% of the recommended daily intake of vitamin C, wouldn’t it stand to reason that a 355 ml can of Cplus ought to contain about 7% of the vitamin C intake? Looks like we, the consumers, have been SCREWED again by marketers. The “Cplus” brand and inclusion of the Sunkist mark on the can are misleading. How can they call it Cplus if there’s not a whiff of vitamin C in the stuff?

The ingredients also include ascorbic acid. Since ascorbic acid = man-made vitamin C, I don’t understand this calculation. Tropicana’s Cranberry Cocktail includes 100% of the daily vitamin C intake according to its Nutrition Facts, via the addition of ascorbic acid. What gives??

To add to the frustration, both Cplus Orange Burst (aka Sunkist soda for Americans) and Orange Crush are made by the same company! Cadbury Schweppes is pulling the strings. But why would they keep two brands of orange pop, when one is obviously superior to the other? It’s not as if Orange Crush is marketed as a premium product.

The most important aspect to selecting an orange coloured and flavoured beverage is, of course, taste. Cplus tastes nasty.

Orange Crush is the shit. R.E.M. even sang a song about it… or it might have been about war, but that’s depressing. Orange Crush is sweet and bubbly, so I’m sticking with the former.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 13:03 -0500 and is filed under rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.