Better Than Milk Vegan Beverage Mix, Rice, Vanilla, 21.4-Ounce Canisters

Better than Milk – Rice (Vanilla) contains maltodextrin, a starchy substance, (made from rice in this case) as its primary ingredient. After that there is sunflower oil, cane juice, maltodextrine (a bulking agent used in coffee creamers, dairy products, etc.) and some other fairly harmless ingredients. I am not a fan of precessed food, but I am looking for a coffee creamer without hydrogenated oils or cow’s milk.

I would not consider this a healthy product to drink by the glass. There is a lot of processing that goes into making this product. In addition, the sunflower oil is bound to be rancid after a couple of days on the shelf. Rancid vegetable oil is very bad for your arteries. I will store my open container in the refrigerator.

For me, the rice powder is too sticky to bu useful as rice milk. The sticky quality of this product would elicit my gag reflex eventually.

For use in coffee, the taste isn’t bad. It is reminiscent of vanilla flavored powdered coffee creamer. For people accustomed to the taste of mucous products (Dairy), it has a kind of “snot” substitute which sticks to your palette. This is probably the attributes of the sunflower oil and maltodextrine. I would recommend using this sparingly in your coffee. You can add a little powdered goat’s milk in lieu of too much rice powder in order to keep the sweetness and stickiness to comfortable levels.

The rice milk powder does not dissolve quickly in your coffee. (Neither does goat’s milk powder.) You will have to wait at least 5 minutes after you drop in the rice powder if you don’t want to chew your coffee. Stirring helps but does not dissolve the powder immediately.

I found a couple of uses for the powder. It is probably not the intended use. The powder seems to improve the taste of chocolate soy ice cream substitute. It also goes well in plain oatmeal with a little cinnamon. Just add a tablespoon or two while you are cooking or heating the oatmeal and shake on some cinnamon. Oatmeal is lumpy and sticky anyway so you can’t tell that the rice powder is also lumpy and sticky. The rice powder is sweet so if you are watching your sugar intake then you should keep this in mind.

I don’t think I will be buying the product again anytime soon. There is probably better non-dairy coffee creamer waiting to be discovered.
Rating: 3 / 5