Staff Picks
Equal Exchange Organic Hot Cocoa
Because pairing it with Brussels sprouts is a terrible idea.
It’s the last week of January (at this writing). Your driveway looks like the planet Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back, your hatchback is an ice sculpture, and you’ve reached the “stoic acceptance” phase of winter. What else are you gonna do? Shovel? Please.
Enter Equal Exchange Organic Hot Cocoa, our official “Staff Pick Banger” for National Hot Chocolate Day (Jan. 31!). Yes, we know hot cocoa and hot chocolate are technically different. Work with us here. Our offices are freezing.
Features
- Region: Local as a Nor’easter.
- Sourcing: Fairly traded and ethically sourced. Uses organic cacao grown by small farmer co-ops.
- Taste: Actually tastes like rich chocolate, which is typically why one drinks a beverage literally named after chocolate.
- Flavor profiles: We’ve got Regular, Dark, and (for all you daring people) Spicy.
- Savings: Buying the Regular variety in the Bulk Department at Hanover or Lebanon is the ultimate power move.
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Yes, National Brussels Sprouts Day falls on the same date, and we’re going to be up front here, we question the synergy of pairing tiny cabbages with cocoa. Please don’t do that. Stick to the chocolate.
Seriously, this is why hot chocolate should exist. Brought to us by our long-time friends right down the road at Equal Exchange in Mass., the flavor truly justifies every hyperbolic thing we could possibly say about it. Listen, if unicorns had their own chocolate factory with stringent magical joy standards and produced a beverage with flecks of sunshine and colorful rainbows in every savory sip that would carry you away to a place where your favorite team would always win the Big Game, this is exactly what that dream scenario would taste like.
Enjoy on National Hot Chocolate Day, or any day.
Sorry, this beverage not guaranteed to replace the hatchback still stuck in a snowbank in your driveway. But it may make you not care as much.
Dry January Pick: NITRO Mocktails
Is it a cocktail? No. Is it a Shirley Temple? Absolutely not—we’re adults here. NITRO Mocktails are for those of us who want to hold a beverage that says, “I’ve actually got my life together,” while our brain says, “I really miss margaritas.” Available in all stores now.
Features
- Genuinely tastes like an $18 drink at a rooftop bar.
- Nitrogen widgets and pressed agave nectar—together at last!
- An award-winning NA experience perfect for Dry January.
We sampled these in our stores recently and couldn’t keep up with demand. (Either that or the demo guy kept drinking the samples.)
Our Latest Sparkling Water Crush
Look, we’ve all been there. You crack open a can of fruit-infused sparkling water expecting a citrus explosion, but instead, it tastes like someone whispered the word “grapefruit” into some soda. Your beverage bubbles in a can of lies.
Enter Spindrift.
These guys actually had the audacity to—get this—squeeze real fruit into the can. Pour it in a glass and you’ll see. There’s actual pulp in the bottom of the glass!
Why our staff is hoarding it in the breakroom:
- It’s basically just carbonated water and squeezed fruit. No “natural flavors” (which we all know is just code for science experiments or whatever).
- It actually tastes like the fruit listed on the label. The Lemon is tart. The Raspberry Lime is zingy. The Grapefruit is grapefruity.
- Usually between 0 and 15 calories. It’s the perfect compromise for when you want a soda but your fitness app is judging you.
Spindrift is made in Newton, Mass., just a stone’s throw (if you have a really, really good arm) from our stores. Seriously, this beverage blew up in Boston delis before taking over the world.
Our Pick for Cold Winter Mornings
Somebody, at some point, looked at oats and thought, “These would be better if they were a little flatter.” We thank that person every morning.
These rolled oats from our friends at Bob’s Red Mill cook up into a bowl that feels like it knows what it’s doing. Add fruit, nuts, honey, even yesterday’s jam experiment. If your morning needs something reliable, comforting, and unlikely to judge you for hitting snooze twice, this is a great place to start!
Find it in our Grocery Departments.
The Noodle Chip So Good It Made Our Social Media Manager Go Rogue
Everyone was looking for our social media guy. Where is this paragon of puns, this guru of the Gram, this heavyweight of hashtags? We needed yet another post about avocado toast, and the man was AWOL.
Then we heard it. Not the triumphant clack of a keyboard, not the gentle thrum of a well-edited video, not the frustrated mutterings of a man bereft of ideas and with deadlines aplenty. No. From right behind his suspiciously closed office door came a sound both primal and utterly indicting:
The crunch of many S’NOODS.
Busted. We flung the door open. There he was, eyes wide, surrounded by the crumpled evidence of his guilt: empty bags of S’NOODS.
For the uninitiated, S’NOODS are the Co-op’s new, ridiculously crunchy, surprisingly addictive noodle chips—pasta-inspired snacks that are gluten-free and infused with chef-driven, globally inspired flavors. They’re savory. They’re crunchy. They’re super noodly in a not-a-noodle-at-all sort of way. They’re apparently so good that our supposed “content creator” has become a content consumer with a total disregard for his duties.
S’NOODS—crispy assassins of productivity! Hanover and Lebanon stores.
