H-E-B Improves on Milk with Mootopia

I search for the perfect food always. I want food that tastes as good as anything I would want to eat, with the health benefits of the foods we know are good for us but aren't exactly the most delicious or desired. Is it wrong to want to eat cheesecake and yet hope it has the nutrition of kale?

Few foods hold up to attempts to add/inject nutrition to them. White bread does, but white bread has no taste to begin with so any efforts to add some nutritional value are most welcome. For some reason, however, when you see 'enriched' on a list of ingredients in bread, you can be sure that any nutritional value it may have had has been processed out. Strange, isn't it?

Last year, the Coca-Cola company partnered with a dairy farm back east to market a new brand of enhanced milk called Fairlife. I've tried each of the Fairlife products and by far, the chocolate milk, with fewer carbs and calories, tastes as rich and creamy as any chocolate milk anywhere. It's totally delightful, decadent even. The white milk, while recently improved in flavor still has an aftertaste to it and doesn't quite match the smooth and creamy deliciousness of regular milk. Still, unlike some naturalists and food purists, I applaud the dairy's attempt to make a better milk product and I do not begrudge anyone partnering with Coke to get their product in the stores. No actual cows were harmed in the process of manufacturing.

When I saw our own Texas supermarket chain H-E-B had developed their own version of Fairlife entitled Mootopia, I was hoping for more than just the same product with a new label slapped on top of it. Indeed, that is a tactic Fairlife/Coke has been trying in convenience stores with single servings of its whole and chocolate milk equivalents  marketed under kid friendly packaging. I can't tell you one way or the other if H-E-B is simply putting their packaging over the same milk product. What I can tell you is the taste is much improved, at least in the product I sampled.

Mootopia has virtually all of the variations of Fairlife and thensome. The packaging is different: where Fairlife is packaged in a modernist, plastic pitcher container, HEB's super-milk comes in a standard milk carton with a very familiar cow pasture-type theme to it. They may be just a tad bit overcompensating for the fact that this product is processed and artificial to obtain its results. The results in the containers are the same: this is modified milk.

HEB's product also has A variation I had not seen in the Fairlife line, namely 2% vanilla-flavored milk. I checked to see that this wasn't soy milk or almond milk marketed under another guise; almond milk makes my stomach hurt, and men should stay away from soy milk in excess unless a pair of man boobs is something you're really looking to have. Once I saw that the ingredients were essentially the same as the Fairlife other products, I selected the reduced fat vanilla for this experiment.

I won't belabor the point,Mootopia Vanilla-flavored 2% reduced fat milk tastes just like regular milk with vanilla flavor added. It's utterly delicious, no pun intended. I tried it with my bowl of shredded wheat, the full-biscuit original version with no sugar or frosting added. It was tasty, tasty, tasty. As sweet as fresh cream. I started wondering what sort of dishes, specifically desserts, I could make with this stuff.

When my current carton of fairlife skim milk runs out, I will be heading back to H-E-B to try their Mootopia equivalent. Until then, I'll be enjoying my daily cereal with the reduced fat vanilla concoction. I'm very impressed.