Upcycling Still Needs to Be Quality

Upcycling is "hot" depending on your political view, though frankly, from a chocolate viewpoint, it should be considered just another way to help the planet and save its ability to grow cocoa trees so we can all continue to have chocolate for generations to come. While upcycling is usually considered a type of clothing, furniture, or homegoods reuse by reimaging and making previously used items into new ones that can be used again. It is also being applied to food and beverage now as a way to decrease food waste. Ideally, I would think it could reduce hunger and cost, but so far, I'm not seeing that as the case. Upcycled items tend to be as expensive if not more expensive than traditional products sadly. Upcycling Day will be on June 24th so to help you prepare, I'm sharing my experience with one upcycled product, the Pancake and Waffle Mix from Grain4Grain in the chocolate variety. I received this via the Amazon Vine program in exchange for reviewing it there; this post is an unexpected extra (though the company may not be thrilled by that if they ever find it). No other form of compensation was received for sharing my experience with you all today.

The first thing I want to note is that we've been making pancakes and waffles from mixes using egg whites only for decades now; it has never affected the quality of the final food. That was not the case here. As you can see below, the inside of the pancake looked undercooked and it tasted cool and undercooked. I thought it tasted terrible and couldn't even eat it.

The directions for how to prepare the pancakes were vague, but we've been making this type of food for decades, keto and high fiber varieties as well as traditional mixes. If you look back up at the photo, you should note how thin the pancake is. The batter itself was incredible thick, however as it heated up, it spread out and became this thin, it never fluffed up at all as we expect to some degree from even the highest fiber pancakes we've tried.

Given that cocoa powder is the 4th ingredient on the mix bag's label, I was expecting a strong chocolately flavor. Nope, not even slightly. Given how many artificial and alternative sweeteners were listed, too, I thought it would be overwhelming sweet, but it wasn't; that was a great surprise. However, this is The Chocolate Cult, we need that chocolate flavor or it cannot meet our standards. This product, doesn't meet our standards at all.