Review: Thrive Homemade Vanilla Frozen Nutrition

I mentioned in my previous Thrive review how it pained me how they referred to this as frozen nutrition on the packaging, but every single other reference to this on the web includes this being referred to as ice cream.  After trying to be cute and calling it frozen nutrition last time, I'll just go ahead and call this ice cream for the purposes of this review, except when I list out the name of this one which is Thrive Homemade Vanilla Frozen Nutrition.  I picked this one up for $3.99 (I had a coupon to tack onto that as well) and each two pack contains two six ounce cups of ice cream.  Each cup is 250 calories and is loaded with all sorts of nutritional benefits, or that's at least what the packaging tells me.

With something that is just vanilla ice cream, I shouldn't really be expecting a lot and in the case of this, I wasn't.  It had off-white vanilla coloring and did smell like vanilla, so from a presentation standpoint, this one wins on that front.  Like my last Thrive review, this cup of ice cream was rock hard and I had to heat it in the microwave for about ten seconds before it would become soft enough for me to eat anything.  Quite a disappointment.  Disappointment not withstanding, as I've mentioned before, true quality of an ice cream manufacturer is measured by the strength of the vanilla flavor and being that I review tastes on this blog, it's time to dive into that.

After I microwaved this for a bit, I dug my spoon into the softened ice cream and took my first spoonful and yep, it tasted like vanilla.  I'm not mocking or making fun of this because the fact that it tasted like vanilla was a good thing.  What was also a good thing was the vanilla flavor as  there was no questioning what this was as it wasn't bland and/or lacking taste at all.  It was strongly vanilla and while it wasn't overly sweet, I would say that this was particularly pleasant.  Pleasantness is obviously a good thing, so Thrive had a success here.

Buy It or Fly By It?  This was vanilla ice cream, so it obviously was not intended to set the world on fire with its wonderful taste.  What it did do though was provide a satisfying vanilla taste and for that, I'm happy to give it a BUY IT rating.  The container labels this as an acceptable meal replacement, which infinitely amuses me and this would definitely fulfill that need.  It'd also be a good dessert on its own or if you so choose, the base of a dessert topped with syrups or whatever other dessert topping of choice that you would choose.  Regardless of what you do, I think you'll be satisfied with a healthy-ish ice cream treat.

BUY IT!!