It is easy to overemphasize the meaning of all this. The calorie count is so tiny - three! - that the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t even require the company to list it, that’s how negligible it is, but they want to list it, Spindrift’s founder and CEO Bill Creelman tells me, because a nutritional panel with non-zero numbers on it is proof that the ingredients are “real.” The color and the calories are the evidence. It wants you to know the lemon grew up on a family farm in California. “We squeezed over 26 real berries and a wedge of lime.” Spindrift wants you to know it is squeezing approximately 37.5 percent of a single lemon into every can. “We squeezed 1/3 of a real cucumber into this 4-pack of sparkling water,” the box copy proclaims. Spindrift, however, gets its taste not from “natural flavors” but from “squeezed fruit,” or what is colloquially known as “juice.” If there is a fruit-adjacent taste - a twist of lime, a soupçon of pamplemousse - it generally comes in the form of “natural flavor,” which is what allows a can of seltzer to taste vaguely, kind of, a little like a tangerine. Seltzers are a subset of sparkling waters: plain water that gets its bubbles from carbon dioxide (CO2). And while not all of them have been free of calories (some varieties, like cane-sugar sweetened Original New York Seltzer, are not so different from clear soda), the dominant players in the current flavored seltzersphere are water equivalents with fizz.Ī nutritional panel with non-zero numbers on it is proof that the ingredients are “real” For the past several decades, “seltzer is clear” has been a defining trait of seltzers, the way floppy ears are a defining trait of basset hounds. (Lemon, which is the color of water with a sunbeam running through it, has only 3 calories, a third of a single Dorito.)īut in the realm of flavored status seltzers - a place where bubbles are clear and nutrients are zero - this is radical. It contains 17 calories, which, according to the calculations of MyFitnessPal, is fewer than two individual Doritos. A can of grapefruit-flavored Spindrift is the color of rose quartz not even rose quartz, but the imprint of where rose quartz used to be. In the wider water world, both are negligible. The first thing that differentiates Spindrift sparkling water from its competitors - also brands of sparkling water - is the color.

Flavored carbonated water healthy