Review: Stonyfield Organic Petite Creme La Vie En Strawberry Low Fat Sweet Fresh Cheese

I shared in my last Stonyfield review that the fact that the container was sweet fresh cheese and not some sort of yogurt (Greek or otherwise) kind of surprised me as I didn't notice it when I bought it.  It wasn't bad, the fact that I was eating cheese kind of shocked me.  So, without that element of surprise, today's review of this single serving cup Stonyfield Organic Petite Creme La Vie En Strawberry Low Fat Sweet Fresh Cheese starts out with me knowing what I'm walking myself into, which is always nice.  I was able to pick this one up for $1.25 at Meijer and each cup is 5.3 ounces with 130 calories and ten grams of CHEESE protein.  Now, I don't speak French, but it is a Latin-based language and I did take three years of Spanish in high school, so I can at least parse my way through the name of this product to see that this basically means "Life in Strawberry."  Umm, okay...kind of a bizarre tagline, but if it's good, I guess the name doesn't really matter (unless you are Ben & Jerry's changing the name of an AWESOME product like they did by changing "Clusterfluff" to "What A Cluster...").

Much like the last Petite Creme that I looked at, the base of this is a strawberry-flavored sweet fresh cheese based that carried a slightly pinkish hue to it to imply the presence of strawberries.  Actually, that's not fair...there was no implying involved here as there were a semi-decent amount of strawberries spread throughout this container and if you look closely enough at my picture above, you can probably pick out a few of them.  Anyway, this one didn't have much of a smell, but what smell I was able to detect did have a VERY faint smell of strawberry, so the namesake ingredient was at least represented in a couple of aspects.

In terms of flavor, that strawberry component was not represented very well.  It was there, but it was an extremely faint taste of strawberry that was only slightly sweet.  This was primarily just a cheese flavored (kind of a cream cheese type of flavor) cup with slight bits of strawberry to break up the texture.  The cheese was also runnier than I would have expected and became more runny as I stirred up the cup.  Quite frankly, the more I tasted this, the more upset I became because the strawberry was such a non-factor.  Also, I actually bought two of these by mistake, so I opened up the second container just to see if I got a bad one and while the strawberry flavor was slightly more potent in that one, it really wasn't all that great either.  To top that all off, this had a peculiar "dry" taste to it (similar to Greek yogurt), despite the fact that it was so runny and that was odd.

Buy It or Fly By It?  What flavor there was in this was extremely weak and was primarily cheese with only a hint of strawberry.  If I wanted cheese, I would have bought cheese.  I wanted strawberry flavor and I didn't get that with this, so this gets a FLY BY IT rating.  It gets that rating not because it was bad but because it did not have the flavor profile that it was going for and that's not a good thing, as we all know.

FLY BY IT!!