I drank La Croix for a week and I still don’t get it
Seriously, why are people obsessed with this?
This past year, I noticed a lot of Instagram posts, Facebook statuses, and Buzzfeed articles about a fancy-looking soda called La Croix. Soon after, I started noticing it all over my campus, carried by bearded film buffs and Bean Boots-clad sorority girls alike.
No matter how many listicles I read, I just could not understand the appeal of this carbonated fruit water. So I decided to buy a case and figure it out for myself.
You can tell that I wasn’t exactly enthusiastic.
I got peach-pear because I figured that I’d be able to love anything that tasted like my two favorite fruits. And while I’m skeptical about most things (especially this glorified bubble water), Donald Duck seemed pretty enthused and how bad could it be?
On first taste, it was…underwhelming. It tasted like when you finish a bottle of juice, and then fill it back up with water, but you can still kind of taste the juice, only this time it has carbonation. It’s not unpleasant, but it definitely isn’t good either.
It kind of tasted like if Natty Light made a fruit flavor, and there’s a reason I avoid Natty Light like the plague.
But I wanted to give it a fair chance. La Croix may be, I mused, a drink that’s made for feeling bougie by the pool. So I tried sipping it while working on a tan and listening to 4:44. Despite achieving the bad and bougie aesthetic, it still tasted like leftover fruit juice and bubbles. All the drink really did was make me feel a sudden urge to gentrify a low-income neighborhood.
I finished off the pack and while it did taste a little better with every can, I still don’t get it. The flavor is so weak that you can barely even tell there’s "natural fruit flavors" in it.
If you’re trying to quit regular sodas, maybe La Croix is for you, since it has 0 calories and no sugar. But me? I don’t even drink soda in the first place, so I especially don’t understand the appeal of muddled peach-pear carbonation.
I’m willing to listen to arguments, but honestly I’m pretty sure La Croix’s popularity is some sort of government scheme.