Strawberry Gatorade

I’d never seen the flavor Strawberry before in regular-sized bottles, but discovered it as part of a giant pack containing 24 bottles total of three different flavors (Berry and Grape being its brothers) in 12 oz bottles.  In the market of strawberry-related drinks there’s not a lot of strong, legitimate competition, outside of artificially sweetened juices where the combination of strawberries and either banana or kiwi is king, or Strawberry Crush, by far the leading purveyor of strawberry in soda form.  In candy strawberry was always the bridesmaid, never the bride, in that it always played second fiddle to cherry.  A lot of candies that offered both flavors usually let cherry keep its true color of red in candy form, but relegated strawberry to pink status, something akin to a black eye in the fruit community surely.

In terms of taste, like most all Gatorade beverages it goes down easy, but I noticed it appeared to me to be a bit more on the sweeter side than many of its brethren.  The strong sense of sweetness might also lend to the fact texturally it seems a little thicker than some of your water-based drinks.  At 90 calories per bottle your not going to feel too guilty about downing one, but I’ve found for food accompaniment I usually need two of these smaller sized bottles to do the trick, and I can’t see it being enough liquid to properly hydrate oneself after a reasonable workout either.

While thus far I’ve yet to find a Gatorade flavor I actively dislike, I can’t say I’d place Strawberry very high on my list of favorites.  While my personal tastes run the gamut of colors and flavors, for the average person if you prefer less exotic choices and like to keep it simple and safe with a red option, Fruit Punch is a longstanding popular flavor, and there’s other delicious choices available like the X-Factor Fruit Punch + Berry hybrid.

Overall Grade: C+