I had such high hopes for Sheer Bliss’s Pomegranate Bar. I had tested it on the floor of the NASFT summer fancy food show. At that time it was sheer bliss ….

That ice cream and the chocolate coating were rich and creamy — so much so that I had to pull my hand away from my mouth and find a garbage can before I finished the entire bar.

At these shows, you cannot finish eating what you really like… or you’d never make it through the day… At least I can’t.

Anyway, I enjoyed the creamy pomegranate ice cream so much I traded business cards with the folks in the booth, so they could send my Bite of the Best team samples for testing.

I had high hoped for this being a FeaturedBite. Not!!

The ice cream that they sent was not what I had eaten at the show. It was grainy, full of ice crystals. The folks from the company said the texture problems were caused by the ice cream in contact with the dry ice used to keep it chilled when sending.

Having received frozen products on dry ice for over 25 years, I emailed them suggested ways of packing the product to keep the dry ice from touching the product:

  • first wrap the ice cream in bubble wrap to keep it from being in contact with the dry ice, or
  • place in a plastic bag and surround that bag with shredded paper or styrofoam, or
  • put a the dry ice in a bag and separate it from the ice cream with a THICK piece of cardboard.

“You certainly want your ice cream to be at its best when potential media or buyers are sampling it!” I emailed.

I never heard back from the Sheer Bliss folks, which made me think that they might not have a decent distribution system in place and the ice crystals are what we’d all find in the supermarket. Perhaps the show samples were a fluke…

Hence this became a TidBite, not a FeaturedBite. Sheer Bliss might have decent ice cream in the stores, and then again, they might not….