Green Product Review: Santa Cruz Organic Fruit Sauces

Santa Cruz Organic has been selling various organic foods for over 30 years. They carry teas, peanut butter, juice, fruit sauce, sodas, dessert toppings and more. My son Cedar LOVES their organic juices and recently they sent me some of their fruit sauces to review so he was excited. I was too because this kid eats organic applesauce like it’s going out of style.

PRODUCT: Santa Cruz Organic Fruit Sauces- we got four flavors to review – apple blackberry, apple cinnamon, apple apricot, and apple raspberry. 

BASICS: These fruit sauces all start with a base of certified USDA organic apples. The base is then mixed with yummy additions like pureed organic fruits – blackberries, cherries, strawberries and apricots, plus other additions like cinnamon and spices.

INGREDIENTS: Obviously vary depending on flavor, but all contain organic fruits, organic juice concentrate, and nothing you can’t pronounce. Full disclosure at their website too. Each 4oz serving offers 100% of your daily value of vitamin C. Fruit sauces are sugar free, fake color free, and there’s no pesticides.

PACKAGING: Comes in 23oz glass jars or snack pack sizes of 6 4oz cups.

COST: I found the glass jars for $2.72 online and the snack packs for $2.84 online, although I’ve seen both packaging types at my local store on sale for $2.50. I wouldn’t purchase snack packs but for the glass jars I can tell you that Santa Cruz Organic sauces are an average price when compared to other organic applesauce brands.

REVIEWERS: Cedar my eight year old, me, my best friend, another adult friend, and my best friend’s two-year-old daughter.

Company eco-perks:

Santa Cruz Organic has so many eco-perks that it’d take a while to list them all here, along with a review, so I decided to post their perks before hand. Read about all of Santa Cruz Organic’s eco-perks.

WHAT WE THOUGHT:

Taste: We all had different favorites but across the board the flavors were a HUGE hit except for with one person; Cedar, our most picky reviewer. He didn’t like any of the flavors except Apple Apricot but he LOVED it so much that he actually got mad when he heard I gave two away to other people to try. Cedar is slow to warm to new foods though so I was surprised he even liked the one.

My favorite was the Apple Blackberry which in my opinion was the perfect mix of apple with a touch of blackberry – not too sweet but perfect! I did think the Apple Raspberry was a little too sweet, but everyone else liked it. My best friend’s daughter really liked the Apple Cinnamon flavor, which I felt was a nice balance of apple and spice (I normally hate cinnamon applesauce because the spice overpowers) this sauce was well balanced. Everyone minus Cedar felt that they’d buy any of the flavors. I should note that whatever the flavor, all had an amazingly apple taste underneath – like fresh picked apples and all flavors were tasty both warm and cold.

Texture: The texture was nice and saucy – not too thick or chunky and not too much like baby food puree, although babies could eat this. It was smooth and juicy but not so juicy that it slid around making a watery mess. My friend noted that this is exactly how applesauce texture should be.

Color: Because of the added fruits these sauces had some color to them. I think that’s kind of fun for most kids (maybe not Cedar).

My weird applesauce story: When I was pregnant with Cedar I was sick and to avoid early labor I had to take this terrible medication stirred into applesauce for most of my pregnancy. Because of that I pretty much HATE applesauce. I don’t eat it at all. Long story short I fully expected to not like these sauces. I thought trying them would be torture. But it wasn’t. I would actually buy the blackberry sauce and eat it; not all the time mind you, but it was actually good. That’s the strongest way I know to recommend this.

OVERALL SCORE:

Five out of five happy little trees. Now, because we all loved the flavor, and because I actually ate the stuff, I’m giving it five stars. However, if you buy the snack packs you’ll lose some eco-friendly aspects because while the little cups are recyclable (good) and the cardboard holder is both recycled and recyclable, it’d be better to buy the jar and put some sauce into an eco-safe food container for packed lunches. If not, that’s a lot of little plastic cups laying around.

Still, just looking at the sauce alone we loved the organic aspects, the flavor, and the companies green ethics, so we’d all absolutely recommend this to others and it’s a perfect take along for healthy school lunches.