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Only Organic Coconut, Banana & Acai Smoothie | Chewsday Review

Today's parent request for a Chewsday Review was for a product I hadn't actually seen before 😱 It's a coconut, banana and acai smoothie, by Only Organic. It's got all of the superfood buzzwords, but is it any good? Let's see...

Ingredients

Banana (53%), raspberry (6%), water, coconut milk (12%), rice flour, acai (1%), vanilla extract, food acid, antioxidant.
Common allergens include: nil
Acai is a fruit, often sold as a pulp, juice or powder. There have been many claims about the antioxidant content of acai, although there is very limited evidence that it has any specific health benefits. Existing studies are often funded by acai companies (bringing the results into question!) or done in test tubes in the lab (which doesn’t replicate what happens in the body. If anything, it’s just a very expensive fruit.

Positives

Fat, sugar and salt content are within healthy guidelines. However, if we treat this as a drink (rather than a puréed food) then it doesn’t meet the guidelines for sugar content. This product contains 12.9g of sugar per 100g and healthy drink guidelines suggest aiming for less than 7.5g/100g. However, there is no added sugar in this product, so all of the sugar can be attributed to the fruit content (60%) of the product.
None of the ingredients are particularly unhealthy or unnecessary in this product (like in some of our recent reviews).

Negatives

No calcium content on the nutrition information panel. This is one of my main problems with the term ‘smoothie’ because usually a smoothie provides calcium for growing bones. This one doesn’t.
No description of fibre content, which suggests it’s not significant (and I’d expect that from a fruit product)
$2.70 per sachet, making it considerably more expensive than other fruit purées or yoghurt squeezies.
Low protein content, at about 1/3 of yoghurt protein content.
Comes in a squeezie pouch, which doesn’t help kids to develop their biting and chewing skills.

Marketing

Alternatives