Yesterday we decided to try one of the new Peters Ice Creams/Arnott's Biscuits hybrid frozen deserts and opted for the Caramel Crowns flavour in the tub.
The blurb on the front of the tub describes it as "Caramel flavour with caramel sauce and chocolate coated biscuit pieces" with a picture of a very nice looking cross section of a Caramel Crown biscuit with the caramel goo oozing out of itself.
So did it deliver when it came time for the family to taste the thing? Not one bit. The only thing that actually resembled a Caramel Crown was the picture on the tub.
While it was marketed to look like a gourmet ice-cream product, by being sold in a small tub that resembled the other higher quality ice creams on the shelf complete with a highly inflated price tag, it didn't even actually contain ice-cream. Instead it was made up of a very sugary ice-confection that tasted not of caramel, as promised, but of a very sickly sweet fondant that you might find wrapped around a wedding cake. It tasted more like an Iced VoVo, which is strange as they've also brought out an Iced VoVo flavour. The only thing that was missing to complete the VoVo'ness was some dessicated coconut on top. The smear of caramel sauce that was confined to a small area between the iced confection and the inside of the tub and the addition of tiny biscuit crumbs did not do anything to make this sickly sweet concoction even remotely resemble the biscuit it was supposed to emulate.
This isn't the first time that a new flavour has completely failed to hit the mark though. I remember when the peanut butter Tim Tams first came out and they didn't even have peanuts in the ingredients, let alone any flavours that were slighly peanutty. And what about the Golden Gaytime Cornetto? Since when does a Golden Gaytime flavour include a thick gluggy chocolate sauce that resembles the cheapest of generic brand chocolate toppings in the mix?
I was surprised to see a tub of Polly Waffle ice-cream in the freezers this week next to a Red-Skin flavoured tub and a Fantales flavour, particularly since the Polly Waffle was discontinued by Nestlé back in 2009. Not in a hurry to try any of them after being burnt by other new flavour combos that simply didn't taste anything like what they're advertised to be.
Could this be classed as false advertising? I'm not happy about forking out the extra dollars and expecting flavours based on the description to only find out it was all just a con to get you to pay more for something that's completely sub-standard and bares no resemblance whatsoever to what was promised. Do they not taste the things before signing off on their new recipes? Do they think the public won't notice that the flavours are completely wrong and we'll just blindly go back and purchase more of the same simply because it has a nice picture and a nice description on the packaging?
My mind is boggled.
