After a royally long wait, I’ve finally tasted Meghan Markle’s jam.
The Duchess of Sussex’s As Ever product launch sold out in under an hour when it dropped on April 2, but I made it my job — which it is — to get my commoner paws on the Raspberry Spread for a taste test. For good measure, I scooped up her Herbal Hibiscus Tea, Herbal Peppermint Tea and Flower Sprinkles, which — if I learned one thing from With Love, Meghan — can go atop anything.
The package was delivered quickly — take that, “porch pirates” — in an innocuous white box that could have been anything … until you spot the “Open with care” label in calligraphy font that screams Meghan Sussex. It also has the (allegedly lifted) As Ever logo. Inside the box, there was a note from “Meghan” — not “Meg,” as her friends call her — telling me to enjoy, and the products wrapped in the biodegradable packing peanuts and tissue paper that gave her sleepless nights.
Raspberry Spread in Keepsake Packaging, $14
Hibiscus and Peppermint Tea, $12 each
At first look, the 7.6 oz jar of preserves (It’s technically not jam. Here’s the difference, but we’ll call it what we want, having waited a year for it.) seems small, but probably because it sits in the larger “elegant keepsake packaging,” which is how the tube it comes in is described on the website. Yes, I spent $5 extra for a cardboard container with a ribbon poking up from the top like Alfalfa that’s already in my recycling bin.
After hearing about the jam for over a year — during which the Montecito, Calif.-inspired lifestyle brand underwent a name change (bye, American Riviera Orchard) — and watching Markle’s celebrity friends post about it on Insta-brag, I couldn’t wait to dig in with a few of my closest coworkers. We heard it was underwhelming and worse, but we went in with open minds and open taste buds.
And yet … we were disappointed as well.
The jam has been called “runny” — the As Ever description says it’s supposed to be (it’s a “fluid texture so it can be drizzled, spread, poured”) — and that was a complaint in our Yahoo kitchen taste test, but it went beyond that.
“Bad taste, bad texture, bad memory,” said one staffer.
The hint of lemon that the jam boasts wasn’t a good thing. “It’s acidic,” said someone else.
“Did we get a bad batch?” asked another person.
In addition to having crackers and bread for our jam party, we had brie, and some people said they liked it atop the cheese but wouldn’t want it alone.
The most positive review was someone saying, “It’s fine,” which is not the kind of thing you’d include in As Ever marketing materials: Raspberry Preserves that taste … fine.
The flower sprinkles were a withering disappointment too. On Markle’s Netflix show, she put them on everything — including kids’ peanut butter and jelly sandwiches — so we thought they had to be good. After all, kids are famously picky eaters.
“It’s like cardboard soaked in perfume,” said one editor. Another compared it to “hard grass.”
“It’s like I ate potpourri by accident,” said a third person.
We had sprinkled the edible flowers on white grocery store cake, and the consensus was: $7 Wegmans cake, good. $15 As Ever sprinkles, bad.
For what it’s worth, they looked pretty. But what does that mean if they’re not palatable?
The one thing people didn’t complain about was the tea. But it was basic — someone compared it to Tazo — as if it could have been any tea bag dropped into a cup of hot water.
While the tea comes in a cute tin, the bags have no branding. The bag string is anchored with a basic white paper tab — like they forgot to print the As Ever logo on it.
That was kind of the thing with the entire taste test. When you’re ordering from Markle’s brand, there’s the idea that you’re buying into what you think will be a royal experience. Or, at the very least, an A-list experience. You want the products to be regal or special or … simply not taste like cardboard or potpourri.
So, after refreshing my computer approximately 576 times to be able to buy these things the moment they went on sale, and being excited to try them and making a moment of it, it didn’t feel like I was getting the royal treatment in any way. It felt more like my money was going toward the mortgage payment on Markle and Prince Harry’s $14.65 million home.
And that was disappointing, as ever.
The post Meghan Markle’s As Ever reviews have been brutal. Here’s what we thought after our jam and tea taste test. appeared first on Yahoo Celebrity.
