This Kroger Brand Coffee Creamer Used To Be More Popular Before A 'Horrific Change'

Kroger is one of our favorite supermarkets for great prices and a pleasant shopping experience, but its store brands can reportedly be hit or miss. For every one of the best items from the Kroger bakery (holy yum!), there's a vanilla ice cream with bad reviews. One Kroger private-label good that may have been a winner, once upon a time, has, if you believe customer reviews, experienced a tragic falling off — White Chocolate Mocha Coffee Creamer. Encased in a bottle with a Kroger-blue cap, this creamer certainly looks like something we'd want to put in our coffee. White chocolate mocha is a favorite flavor combo, too. What could come across so badly about this product that it managed to fall to a pitiful 1.53 out of 5-star rating? Let's ask the reviewers.

"Change it back!" one review title pleads, going on to rant: "Why did you change it? It was my favorite creamer. Please change it back!!" Another review called this mystery change "horrific," and the customer vowed to never buy it again: "Oh my word. What did you guys do! Did you even try putting this in a blind taste test with the original? I'm certain 8 out of 10 people, at the least, would call this change a massive fail. Horrible. Will never buy again." Asking "why mess up a good product?" another comment gave a bit of a hint as to what, exactly, the problem was: "I have been using this creamer for years, the change in the oil type used makes it disgusting ! I will not be purchasing it again." The oil came up in yet another criticism, which compared the flavor to cooking oil.

Like we mentioned, Kroger's private-label goods have, from time to time, come under fire — just look at a frozen cheese tortellini dinner that was alternatively called salty and tasteless! Being fans of creamer with our daily coffee, we wondered what, exactly, caused so much kerfuffle over Kroger's white chocolate mocha creamer in particular. Looking at the ingredients list on the product page, we think we might have spotted a clue.

Right behind water and sugar on the list was "High Oleic Soybean Oil and/or High Oleic Sunflower Oil," quite a few entries ahead of milk derivative sodium caseinate. All this to say that there doesn't appear to be any actual milk or cream in this creamer. Now, this, in and of itself, isn't necessarily unusual in coffee creamers — a major competitor of Kroger's creamer, International Delight, lists a similar makeup in its own white chocolate mocha creamer, but uses palm oil instead. 

In recent years, palm oil, which was once cheap and abundant, has become more expensive than soybean or sunflower oil ... which may just be the change that Kroger customers bemoaned, with a built-in explanation to boot. Of course, this is purely speculative, and, without knowing for sure what the change is that Kroger customers detected, we can't comment on it in any intelligent manner. Still, a little sleuthing has raised some interesting questions about this product.