Tag: Nestlé

Nestlé is one of the largest multinational corporations in the world, and one of the most evil. In the 70’s, it ran ad campaigns in the developing world trying to convince mothers that breastfeeding was bad so they would buy their formula – this led to dramatic infant malnourishment and death. They repeated these campaigns in Pakistan in the 90’s and China in the 2010’s. Nestlé uses forced adult and child labor to produce the cocoa beans it uses for its products, thus being a modern day slaver. And it uses its political and economic power to appropriate water sources from communities, including at times of drought, leaving those communities without water.

Nestlé owns so many brands that it is often impossible to avoid it – as shown by my reviews – but I want to try to chose other products when available.

Buitoni Italian Sausage Ravioli with Prego Creamy Tomato Garlic Sauce review

November 13, 2026 / marga / 0 Comments

A few days ago I made Buitoni Italian Sausage Ravioli with pasta sauce for lunch. The refrigerated ravioli are huge, the type that you need to cut in two to fit into your mouth. The filling has visible chunks of Italian sausage mixed with cheeses and breadcrumbs. It definitely tastes like Italian sausage, and you can easily just eat these ravioli with only added butter or olive oil – they are pretty dry, so they need a source of moisture. They did OK with the tomato-based pasta sauce I used, but this mostly covered the flavor of the sausage so it was unnecessary.

The regular package is 10 oz, and will feed two if you add a salad or you are not very hungry. It was $7 at Safeway, but I got it in a BOGO deal.

Buitoni in America is owned by MA private company Tuscan Brands, in Europe, by Nestlé.

Prego, along with Ragú, are two of the oldest supermarket pasta sauces. They are also the cheapest – created at a time when economy and convenience were the most important factors for shoppers. As inflation brings hunger to America, we are right back where we started.

Prego sauces are made with tomato paste, rather than with whole or diced tomatoes as the more expensive brands. If you watch food tasters out there, Prego ranks at the bottom. It may be familiarity, but I actually like these cheaper pasta brands, as I find them more flavorful and complex – they need to make up with spices what they can’t accomplish with fresh ingredients.

Prego Creamy Tomato Garlic is part of a new line of Prego sauces which combine tomato sauce with cream. I think they are founded on the success of vodka sauce which became a thing a decade or two ago. I thought it was very good. On the ravioli, it was a tad too acidic and but it was very tasty, but I also used it to make my regular meat sauce and it was absolutely delicious in it. My husband actually remarked at how good it was, and we ended up eating up the whole sauce from the pot before we even boiled the pasta.

The sauce was $2 at Safeway (from $4.50 regular). Prego is made by Campbell’s,

More pasta & sauce reviews

California Pizza Kitchen Sicilian and Margherita Pizzas review

November 1, 2026 / marga / 0 Comments

Surprisingly good

California Pizza Kitchen is both a pizzeria chain and a brand of premium frozen pizzas. They were famous back in the 90’s because of their unusual toppings, which has become far more common in the decades since. Their frozen offerings have changed over the decades, and lately they seem to specialize on thin crust pizzas. I prefer thick crust myself, but I decided to gave these a try last time they were on sale at Safeway ($5 each from $10 regular price – $8 at cheaper stores).

I was actually quite surprised with how much I liked the pizzas. They don’t tste like frozen pizzas at all. While the “crispy thin” crust was, indeed, crispy if cooked for the full time, it had a nice, chewy texture if lightly undercooked. It held the toppings well, without much spillage, and because it was so thin, it didn’t compete with the toppings. And the toppings were very good.

Each pizza realistically serves 2 people when accompanied by a salad (or if they aren’t too hungry).

Unfortunately, California Pizza Kitchen is manufactured by Nestlé – a company that I try to avoid whenever possible because it’s evil. Doubly unfortunately, I often forget what items are made by Nestlé and buy them anyway – this was the case here.

The Sicilian Recipe pizza has Italian sausage, spicy ham, Genoa salami, sweet basil, Mozzarella and Fontina cheeses and a spicy marinara sauce. It definitely had a kick – enough that it woke me up but didn’t turn me away from eating it. I can handle a little bit of spice, but I’m someone who orders her food “mild” at a restaurant.

The toppings are well balanced, complementing each other without interfering. It’s clear someone worked to make sure they all worked together in the right proportions. The sauce had a slight sweetness to it that worked very well to counter the spiciness – again, thought went into this. What the toppings lacked, however, was an element of crunch. This might be provided by the crispy crust – but I purposely undercooked it. I would have liked some added onions or peppers.

I liked the Margherita pizza even better. It has Roma tomatoes, Mozzarella and Fontina cheeses, olive oil and basil, and comes with an Italian herb sauce. The toppings were tasty and extremely well balanced. The sauce succeeded in not being too sweet, being subtle and not competing with the tomatoes while still providing some needed acidity. The tomatoes were bright and fresh tasting and the basil pesto was very tasty and used sparingly, which made it a welcome surprise when you took a bite with it. In all, I enjoyed this pizza very much.

Acqua Panna Natural Spring Water review

October 30, 2026 / marga / 0 Comments

Nothing

My husband does not like mineral water. He always complains about the mineral flavors and believed, until now, that he preferred as pure and clean water as possible. Come Acqua Panna.

Acqua Panna is mineral water. It comes all the way from springs in Tuscany. But I read that it was as pure and neutral tasting as water can possibly be. After buying a bottle on sale for $3(!) we can say they are right. This water somehow manages to taste like absolutely nothing.

It’s quite disconcerting, really, how water can be so completely insipid. And insipid is exactly what I meant. Tasting it, I was brought back to 3rd grade, when we studied the properties of water: colorless, insipid and odorless (it sounds better in Spanish, inodora, incolora e insípida).

I really don’t think I’ve ever truly knew what insipid meant until I drank this water, however. Not a trace of a single mineral, a single sort, a single chemical. Not a trace of anything. It’s actually quite remarkable. And quite unsatisfactory. No one in the family liked the water, even my husband had to admit that he likes flavor in his water after all. Indeed, what he likes is tap water – our tap water – which might have hints of chlorine and fluorine, if nothing else.

Besides sucking, Acqua Panna is owned by Nestlé, one of the most evil corporations in the world.

Drink Reviews

Coffee Creamer Reviews

October 11, 2026 / marga / 0 Comments

The good, the tasty, and the scary

I’m lazy. Anyone who knows me can attest to that. It’s not something I’m proud of but there is no point about lying about it. I’m as lazy a person as it comes. This means, that I do look for shortcuts whenever possible, and that’s always been my approach to coffee.

Like many Latin Americans, I grew up drinking instant coffee, and I did not change that habit until my mother gifted me a Keurig machine, some time over a decade ago. For me, brewing coffee in a regular coffeemaker was too much trouble. I had added milk and sugar to my coffee until I discovered creamers – probably not too long after they started to fill supermarket refrigerators. Creamers – or so I thought – combine milk/cream and sugar, plus often another flavoring, cutting one step in my morning coffee making. Plus, to be honest, they taste better than just milk.

Alas, until I started reviewing different creamers for this blog post, I hadn’t actually looked at the ingredients on them. I had assumed – silly me! – that they were made from milk or cream, given that most brands distinguished between their regular and non-dairy varieties. Imagine my surprise when I realized than the cheaper brands don’t have milk or cream at all. They are not technically diary-free only because they include milk-derived proteins such as sodium caseinate and micellar casein, but otherwise they are a mixture of sugar, oil and water. Yuck. One brand, Coffee Mate, even includes cellulose!

Truth be told, until reading the ingredients, I usually bought from whatever brand was on sale at Safeway that week – usually for $3 or $4. I’ve tried the natural ingredients brands, but I hadn’t enjoyed the flavors as much. I might be revisiting them, however.

The purpose of this blog post is as a memory aid of the creamers I try and my impression of them, to see whether I’ll buy them again. I do like variety above almost everything.

Bad ingredient creamers

These include Coffee Mate, Delight and some Lucerne creamers. These creamers are mostly made from water, sugar and oil, plus flavorings and a whole bunch of chemical-sounding ingredients. Coffee Mate is owned by Nestlé, one of the most evil companies in the world, Delight is owned by a French company accused of greenwashing and Lucerne is a private brand from Albertsons which currently owns Safeway.

Coffee Mate Pumpkin Spice (on sale for $3 from $6 regular price)

I got this seasonal flavor for my daughter, but I tried it after I run out of my regular creamer. It’s not for me – I’m not a big fan of pumpkin spice anything, much less in coffee. My daughter liked it, however, and preferred it to the Chobani flavor-wise.

Ingredients: water, sugar, soybean oil, dipotassium phosphate, micellar casein, diglycerides, cellulose gel, natural and artificial flavor, cellulose gum, carrageenan, acesulfame potassium and sucralose.

Coffee Mate Harry Potter Butterbeer ($2.50)

I got this creamer at Grocery Outlet, our discount supermarket, when we ran out of creamer. I simply had to get it for my Harry Potter loving daughter. She felt the butterbeer (butterscotch) flavor wasn’t strong enough. Personally, I feel the very artificial flavor pushing in and it’s not unpleasant. It actually somewhat reminded me of the apple butter coffee cake flavor below. Maybe it’s the “butter”. I wouldn’t buy it again, but it’s definitely drinkable.

Ingredients: water, sugar, soybean oil, dipotassium phosphate,mono and diglycerides, cellulose gel, natural and artificial flavor, cellulose gum, carrageenan, acesulfame potassium and sucralose.

Delight Apple Butter Coffee Cake.

I totally hesitated before getting this flavor because “apple” and “coffee” don’t go together, even when followed by cake. Still, I was already planning to write this blog entry and I was curious, plus the reviews were pretty good.

It was OK – drinkable, but after a week I switched to a different creamer and discarded the half-bottle that was left. The artificial apple flavor was quite distinguishable and, as I suspected, didn’t really mesh with the coffee. Indeed, the flavor was so strong that it completely hid that of the medium-roast coffee. It might be able to stand up to dark-roasted coffee, but I didn’t try it. I wouldn’t buy it again.

Ingredients: water, sugar, palm oil, sodium caseinate, dipotassium phosphate, carrageenan, mono and diglycerides, flavoring, sodium stearoyl lactylate and salt.

Lucerne Belgian Chocolate Toffee (on sale for $3 from $4 regular price).

This has been my go-to creamer for several years. I like the chocolate flavor and the “toffee” seems to round it up. The ingredients, however, are just awful, and I should probably just buy chocolate milk instead. They are: water, sugar, vegetable oil, cocoa, sodium caseinate, dipotassium phosphate, DATEM, artificial flavor, cellulose gum, polysorbate 60, salt, carrageenan. Despite this, it’s not vegan because the sodium caseinate comes from milk products.

Actually milk/cream based creamers:

natural bliss is owned by evil Nestlé, Chobani is privately owned, Lucerne is a private brand from Albertsons which currently owns Safeway and Starbucks creamer is also manufactured by Nestlé.

natural bliss Chocolate Caramel Truffle ($3)

This creamer accomplishes its basic job of lightening and sweetening my coffee, but it doesn’t really add much in the way of chocolate or toffee flavor beyond some notes of bitterness which might just be the coffee pushing through. Still, it does cover up the coffee flavor somewhat, so if you’re going this way, you might be better off with just a simple unflavored creamer. I got this at Grocery Outlet when I ran out of creamer but I wouldn’t choose it again.

The ingredients are good, though: skim milk, cream, sugar and natural flavor.

Chobani Cookies & Cream (limited edition, on sale for $4 from $7 regular price)

Chobani offers the most flavors as far as milk-based creamers go. They come in smaller bottles, which makes it a worse value fluid oz per fluid oz, though they are at least not owned by an evil corporation. My real problem with these creamers, like with other milk-based creamers, however, is the taste. It’s pretty mild, and this one tastes just like a weak chocolate milk. This means needing to add more – and at that point I think I may just buy chocolate milk and leave it at that.

Ingredients are: milk, cream, cane sugar, “natural” flavors, cocoa and sea salt.

Chobani Pumpkin Spice (limited edition, on sale for $4 from $7 regular price)

I got this for my daughter and she felt she needed to put far more of it than of the Coffee Mate kind. She would have it again, but prefers Coffee Mate taste-wise.

Ingredients are: milk, cream, cane sugar, “natural” flavors

Lucerne Real Milk & Cream Caramel Macchiato (on sale for $4 from $5 regular price).

Lucerne has both fake and real creamers, the latter costing about $1 more than the former. The difference in ingredients is night and day.

I really wish I liked these natural creamers more than the oil-and-water ones. But I don’t. The creamer enhances, rather than tames, the bitter flavor of the coffee and the caramel flavor doesn’t quite mesh with the coffee. Maybe it lacks sweetness, but it forces me to add more than I would otherwise. I much prefer the Starbucks of the same flavor, but that one is manufactured by Nestlé. I do like there is nothing unnatural (save for the flavors) to this creamer.

Ingredients: milk, cream, sugar, and natural flavors.

Starbucks Caramel Macchiato (on sale for $4 from $8 regular price).

I enjoyed this creamer quite a bit. It gave my coffee a creamy mouthfeel and it had a nice, sweet caramel flavor which wasn’t too overwhelming. Alas, it has some added oil and gellam gum and it’s manufactured by Nestlé.

Ingredients are: nonfat milk, sugar, heavy cream, buttermilk, vegetable oil, “natural” flavor and gellam gum.

California Pizza Kitchen BBQ Chicken Pizza review

July 23, 2024 / marga / 0 Comments

Not bad for thin pizza

I’m not a fan of thin crust pizza, but obviously carbs are bad for me so I could enjoy pizza more often if I could convince myself to go for the thin crust. California Pizza Kitchen might just convince me to do that.

I’d always liked California Pizza Kitchen, though I can’t remember going to an actual restaurant since my 22-yo was a baby. It’s not surprising, the only one in the East Bay is in Dublin, and if I’m going to go that way, I’m going to go to Zachary’s instead (and not for the thin pizza). Their frozen pizzas, however, are manufactured by Nestlé (a very problematic company). I didn’t realize that when I ordered this one, or that they also make DiGiorno and Tombstone pizzas). Hopefully I’ll remember and avoid them in the future.

These pizzas were on sale at Safeway last week for $6 (regular price is $10) and as we didn’t have particularly high temperatures forecast for this week, and I didn’t realize they were made by Nestlé, I decided to give them a try.

The BBQ chicken pizza tasted just like I remembered from long ao. I enjoyed the flavor combination of sweet (but not too sweet) BBQ sauce, chicken, red onions and cheese. The dough wasn’t too crispy, and it served the toppings well. Being so thin, it only required about 12 minutes in a pre-heated oven.

A pizza is large enough to serve 2 if you add a salad. At under 15-oz, it’s not a super great value, but probably better than filling yourself up with carbs. I’d get it again if it wasn’t made by Nestlé.

Bellafoglia and California Pizza Kitchen Frozen Pizzas – yuuum

December 8, 2011 / marga / 1 Comment

Tuesdays are a hard dinner day for me. The kids have classes until late, so we don’t get home until 5:30, and then Mike has to go and rush to make it to his School Board meetings. While I love cooking, I don’t like cooking when I’m rushed and I don’t particularly want to cook just for the kids and I (if I make what they want, I won’t be happy, if I make what I want, they won’t be). So often times, if we have no leftovers, we rely on take out or frozen food. Last night was one of those nights, so I headed to Grocery Outlet for some frozen pizza.

Generally, Grocery Outlet has tons of choices, but this time they were more limited. The kids only like cheese pizza, so I went for this California Pizza Kitchen version. I’d had the CPK frozen pizzas before, and I’d liked them. Well, so did the kids. While they still prefer take out pizza, they were perfectly happy to eat this one. We got the version that comes with the flat bread appetizer, and the kids pronounced the bread the “best bread ever”. It’s pretty good, and it tasted garlicky to me, but I didn’t tell them that :-). I didn’t try the spinach artichoke dip as that’s not my thing. This pizza was available at GO for $4. It’s think crust, so it pretty much only fed my two hungry kids.

For me, I got a Bellafoglia pizza with a bunch of toppings ($4). I’d never heard of the brand, but I’m glad I gave it a try. This was by far the best frozen pizza I’ve ever had. The cornmeal crust had a lot to do with it, it was just crunchy enough, just salty enough and just very good. The cheese and toppings were good quality and were well balanced. I did some research when I came home, and found out that Bellafoglia is a product of Hayward’s Pacific Cheese Co. a cheese supplier. Sizewise, this pizza may be enough for two adults, but probably if they eat a salad or something else as well. I ate half of one, and was hungry later in the evening.

In all, I think I’ll keep a few of these pizzas in my freezer for nights just like last’s.

Tag: Nestlé

Buitoni Italian Sausage Ravioli with Prego Creamy Tomato Garlic Sauce review