TrulyObscure - article - domicilia - Food -- It's All in the Packaging

It’s not entirely true that you can’t judge a product by its packaging. A lot of obscure and interesting products make a point of drawing attention to their innovativeness through their sleek and distinctive package designs, which is how we found three different food and beverage companies: First Blush juices and teas, didi davis’s sugar and salt blends, and Alili’s Moroccan honeys and olives.

First Blush beverages caught our eye with a great site and fantastic packaging. They advertise a juice line and a juice-tea line, in great flavors like cabernet, syrah, merlot and chardonnay.

But wait, doesn’t that mean it’s all just grape juice? Yes. Yes, it does. But so much more varied and interesting than your average grape juice that it’s like discovering new juices instead of rediscovering the juice you’ve been drinking since childhood. First Blush boasts that through these juices, it is also providing you with the health benefits of wine, including the antioxidant Resveratrol, without the alcohol.

The teas are generally better than the straight juices, in part because the juice is so sweet. No sugar is added and so all sweetness is naturally occurring, but the white tea cuts the juice nicely, making the chardonnay white my favorite of the bunch. Products should be available in many Whole Foods and Safeway grocery stores.

didi davis food has perhaps the most innovative packaging of the bunch. They offer a sugar blend collection, with flavors such as orange ginger, mojito, and espresso sugars, and a salt blend collection, with flavors such as fennel thyme, caraway and aleppo chile. But the awesome part is that all these flavors are stacked one on top of the other in a neat cylindrical shape. To use a salt or sugar blend, simply unscrew it from its companions and add to taste.

The difficulty of buying the collection of flavors is that it might be more creative than you are. Even with the handy guides on the side of each blend, figuring out the proper way to dispose of all these different flavors is a bit of a challenge, and I expect that at least one flavor goes unused with most people who buy the item. Additionally, though spice cylinder is compact and efficient, occasionally it was difficult to unscrew one from the other, made more difficult by them all being connected. One salt was especially stuck and took a lot of prying to loosen.

The salts are easiest to find uses for as adding them to veggies or meats is an easy way to spice up those dishes. I also find them great if you have house guests, good bread and olive oil. The creators put a great deal of effort into finding salt flavors that generally did not duplicate one’s typical spice rack. However, the flavors in the sugar blends were overall more palatable and I especially enjoyed the spiced gold sugar. Suggested uses for them include hot cereal, fruit salad, yogurt, as topping on crumbles and around a glass rim (mojito and lemon sugars).

The sugar blend collection can be purchased for $13, which includes 6 flavors. The salt blend collection runs at $20 for 8 flavors. Salt and sugar blends can also be purchased individually by flavor, which may be preferable for most people, but the collections make a fun gift.

Finally, the packaging for Alili products is subtle but elegant. Their honey is perhaps the sleekest-looking honey around. Alili specializes in high-quality products from Morocco. We tried their carob seed honey, which did indeed have a very rich, chocolatey flavor that was somehow reminiscent of Middle Eastern cuisine. Though the honey can be used in the usual varieties of ways honey is known for, it also has a slightly raw taste and because of that it seems to work best with cooked dishes, of which I would definitely recommend lamb.

Alili has an excellent and wide-ranging selection of olive mixes from which to choose. Their citrus olive mix mixes black and green olives with large citrus chunks and tastes very authentically Moroccan and very fresh. Their Marrakech olive mix is slightly spicy and was my favorite of the bunch for its novelty. The oil cured olives were amazing and addictive salty black olives.

What I especially liked about this company is their green olives. Usually, I’m a black olive kind of girl, but their green olives had a subtle flavor, not too pungent, and were of obvious high quality. Alili recommends the olives as an ingredient in tagines or couscous. I used them in an experimental Moroccan hen dish I made, but generally I imagine most people eat them straight from the jar. The main thing I didn’t like? I hate pits.

They also offer olive oils, spreads, capers, hot peppers and preserved lemon. Prices for honey is $11.99 for a 11.5 oz jar. Olive mixes are $7.99 a jar.