Keep Your Eye on the Fruit

Hey, it's breakfast time. Are you hungry? Would you like some waffles? Well, both of these choices by Van's are wheat, gluten, dairy, and egg-free, are made with whole grain, and are sweetened with fruit juice, so it will be a tough choice.

What it comes down to is, do you want the blueberry or the strawberry?

TRICK QUESTION--the one the right is not strawberry! There isn't any strawberry juice injected into that waffle at all--it is only sweetened with pineapple, peach, and pear juices! Unless you want to cut up the strawberries out of the cardboard packaging, you won't be eating any red fruits with your waffles this morning. The waffles in the blueberry box has all those juices too, but actually does contain dried blueberries as well as blackberries.

I still buy a variety of Van's waffles anyway because there's no dairy in them (and they're often on sale) but their boxes can be tricky. There are many different flavors of waffles but none of the boxes with red banners have a strawberry in them. In fact, all of the red banner boxes have a non-fruit word associated with them: either "totally natural" or "homestyle." Yet each one of those boxes has a picture of a red fruit on it.

So which came first--the picture or the egg? Wait, there's no egg. Which came first--the picture or banner? I'll give them the benefit of the doubt because they seem like a cool company and guess that they just chose a banner color that matched something in the picture, and having the strawberries there was poetic licence. But with all the varieties they have that actually do contain ingredients that match the banner color (flax is gold, apple cinnamon is dark red, chocolate chip is brown), it probably would have been more appropriate to select a neutral color for the ones that don't.

Now here's the real kick in the pants--the "Berry" box labelled with the purple banner contains the same berries that the "Blueberry" one does (dried blueberries and blackberries). No peach, pineapple, or pear juice, but definitely no raspberries as pictured.

And none of these waffles even taste remotely like sneakers!