Blending Pom Wonderful with calorie-free tea creates a lower-calorie beverage that’s delish.

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January 2008

Product Reviews / Main Nibbles / Beverages

Pom Wonderful Iced Tea

In Light Tea Pom, Pomegranate Juice & Iced Tea Live Happily Ever After

CAPSULE REPORT: What happens when you mix Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice with green, white and red teas? You get three flavors of Light Tea Pom, a captivating new beverage that, as Candide might have said, is the best of all possible worlds. There’s the rich, ripe flavor of pomegranate juice and the lightness of tea, all for just 35 calories per eight ounces. There’s the double antioxidant hit of these two antioxidant powerhouses. There’s a keepsake glass with each purchase. And, the teas make great cocktail mixers. The best of all possible worlds, indeed!

• Overview
• Light Tea Pom Varieties
• Shopping Information

How happy are we! The folks at Pom Wonderful have taken their delicious Pom Wonderful juice (8 ounces, 140 calories) and blended it with three varieties of no-calorie tea. The result: delicious beverages for just 35 per eight ounces. And there’s a bonus: They’re packaged in reusable glasses, evocative of the jelly jar juice glasses for kids, but for grown-ups. The slender glasses, 6-1/2 inches tall and embossed with the Pom logo, are rugged and have a certain generational cachet. In fact, NIBBLE staff members eschew the pricier goblets and stemware in the kitchen and have been using the Pom glasses for their water and other beverages.

But we’re here for the tea, so let’s get to it.

Almost everyone who reads about food knows that tea is lauded for its antioxidant properties. So is pomegranate. See how they compare to other high-antioxidant foods:

• 300 ORAC units/gram for green tea (white tea has slightly more
  and red/rooibos slightly less)
• 105 ORAC units/gram for pomegranate fruit or juice
• 93 ORAC units/gram for cranberry fruit or juice
• 77 ORAC units/gram for blueberries
• 55 ORAC units/gram for blackberries and raspberries

The beauty of tea is that it has no calories and is always available—you can pretty much get a cup of tea anytime, anyplace; and if green tea isn’t available, it’s easy to BYO tea bag. Although it’s not as accessible or as portable as a tea bag, for not many more calories than a zero-calorie cup of tea, Pom Wonderful has created a lovely, light, sweet iced tea drink, blending tea with Pom Wonderful and other juices, and adding a bit of low-glycemic sweeteners.

Varieties Of Tea

The Light Tea POM line debuted with three tasty teas—assuming you can call this hybrid tea-juice beverage “tea.” Brewed tea is blended with Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice and a second juice to round out the flavor, along with natural flavors. It’s sweetened with fructose, lower on the glycemic scale than table sugar, and erythritol, a natural, calorie-free sugar alcohol (read more about them in our article, Demystifying Sugar Substitutes). The result is very light, natural-tasting sweetening—if you didn’t read the label, you’d think that the sweetness was purely from the pom juices.

There is no wrong choice in this group; each of the varieties has charming nuances of flavor that compel one to drink the entire 13.5-ounce glass. Pomegranate Hibiscus Green Tea (pink top) has the lilt of hibiscus, a flavor that is too underrepresented (hibiscus juice is blended with the pom juice and tea). It is both floral and herbaceous with a bit of citrus tang. Pomegranate Orange Blossom Red Tea (orange top) has notes of honey and honeydew. There’s some orange juice in the blend. The flavor of rooibos is discernable but very light. People who have not enjoyed the strong flavor of this caffeine-free red tea from Africa may well enjoy it in this form.

Pastel-topped, reusable glasses hold tasty Light Pom teas.

• Pomegranate Wildberry White Tea (lavender top), brewed from White Peony tea with added blackberry juice, has nice mixed berry flavor not wild, but light and lovely.

The drinks are very refreshing, enjoyable even in the winter months, and make an instant cocktail with the addition of vodka or gin.

Yes, Light Tea POM is about twice the price of some bottled teas on the shelf, but you can’t compare the quality. And then, there’s that collection of party glassware you can amass.