PC Blue Menu: Omega-3 Granola, Sparkling Peach Mango Fruit Juice & Organic Quinoa

Thanks to a President’s Choice care package I have tons of products to try and review! I will begin with their Omega-3 Almond Vanilla Granola. First impressions? LOVE it! I find most granolas heavy and dense with too much packed into it. Either it is too coconut-y or cinnamon-y and all of them are too sweet for me. I want a nice tasty not sickeningly sweet granola but I gave up trying to find one because they were all “too much” until now, this one is perfect for me!

Yes, you can have it in a bowl on its own but one of my favourite applications is adding it to my Alpen cereal which I have been eating off and on since I was a little girl. I can easily hide ground flax in Alpen which I grind fresh every day. I was happy to discover that this granola product has not only flaxseed meal in it, it also contains the superfood salba seeds! Usually when people add flax to a product they leave the seeds whole which is kind of useless. You need to grind them up to get to the omegas and President’s Choice figured that out. Bravo!

That said, there are only 2.5 grams of Omega-6 and .5 grams of Omega-3 in 2/3 cup but I will take it. There are also 10 grams of fat! But only 1 gram of the fat is saturated so most of the fat is good for you. There are a whopping 7 grams of protein in that 2/3 cup which is impressive! There does seem to be at least 20% almonds in every bowl full. I find the vanilla flavour to be very subtle but love the crunch of this granola. The crisp rice loses its crispness pretty quickly though but considering 10% of this cereal also contains 10 per cent iron, I am a happy camper. I will definitely pay $3.49 for this box of granola and be picking it up on a regular basis.

I give this product four and a half out of five wooden spoons. 

I am happy to report that the 100% Sparkling Fruit juices in the PC Blue Menu flyer seem to have come down in price from $3 to $2.49 for four cans. It is still a little high for carbonated fruit juice but definitely more reasonable. You may recall I did a review of their Kiwi Berry Juice back in December and this time I get to try their Peach Mango.

I had picked some up at Christmas as a treat and later made my pseudo sangria with it. So good! I was excited to try it again, this time “straight,” LOL. I loved the natural golden colour that comes from the peaches and mangos. It is a light drink that tastes like carbonated fruit juice which is exactly what it is.

You get two servings of fruit with no added sugar, flavours or colour but! And there is a but! You get around the same amount of calories in the juice as you do a can of Coke. Coke cans are larger and they contain 140 calories. In this smaller can you get 120 calories. I would much prefer my calories to come from fruit but if you are on a calorie-restricted diet, this may not be the product for you.

As much as I appreciate the heading “Wean the kids off pop” in the flyer, I think many teens and adults should also be weaned off pop. I am very much against pop for everyone and think we forget about ourselves sometimes. There is nothing good for you in pop at all! I would also rather have real sugar than chemicals in diet drinks… OK, sermon over.

I am thrilled the price went down for this product. As a result, I will now consider buying it more often. I love this in mixed drinks and the small cans help prevent waste. It is also fabulous on its own. I give this product four and a half out of five wooden spoons. 

PC Organics Quinoa was the toughest of the three products to reviews because it was a completely new ingredient for both me and my husband. I usually do not like healthy grains (except for barley) so I figured I would not like it. Boy was I wrong! I LOVED it! And Reg? He hated it. I mean HATED it. He had to force himself to eat it, poor guy. I promise I will never make him eat it again, LOL. It is not the product’s fault. He just does not like grains that are chewy in any way.

One thing I did not like is the instructions of the box. It told you to stir in the entire contents of the box into 2 cups of water. I had no idea what the ratio was, did not have time to figure it out, so I dumped it all in. It made WAY too much! Even after eating a ton of it for dinner we still had this pot filled with quinoa that I tried to eat but a lot of it ended up being wasted. Also, the smell is not very pleasant. Kind of like smelled like cooked hay so I did not think I was going to like it but with my coq au vin it was fantastic. As a cold salad though? Not so much.

910 grams = 11.49 .79 cents per gram
225 grams = 2.49 .90 cents per gram

I did some price comparison at the Superstore and found that one small box (if I did my math right) was a little more than buying it in bulk size from its competitor. Considering that little box will last me quite a long time, I am OK with the price and prefer to have a smaller box.

Quinoa is healthy no matter how you look at it so as far as I can tell there is not a lot that makes it different from other merchants’ quinoa. In the flyer it does say that you do not need to rinse this PC Organics Quinoa but other than that???

The stats photographed above come from the competitor’s packaging and even though they are the same amount cup-wise as the PC product, there are 5 more grams in the PC product making comparison a little challenging. I can tell you the one thing that is clearly different is the PC product has 5 grams of sodium and the competitor’s quinoa has none. Why a grain would have sodium in it, I have no idea. So I have to knock off the rating a little for a “healthy” product with additional sodium.

I give this product four out of five wooden spoons. 

In general, I loved these products and am always excited to try something new by President’s Choice. I am happy to say that I will be buying each of these products again very soon, I enjoyed them that much.

More reviews to come soon!