Aldi Customers Destroyed Its Fat Free Half And Half

For the most part, Aldi's groceries keep shoppers happy and coming back. There are even Instagram accounts that track the latest deals and limited-time offerings. However, not every product is going to be a hit with consumers. In fact, Aldi's customers seem to loathe one product in particular — fat-free half-and-half creamer — and they're not afraid to let their feelings be heard.

Taking to the Aldi Reddit, one user blasted the product after accidentally buying the fat-free instead of the regular kind of half-and-half during a recent shopping trip. According to the original poster, the product ruined their cup of coffee. They wrote, "I wasn't feeling well and trying to just get out quickly. I've put it in my coffee and the taste is just... unsettling." It wasn't long before other users also shared their distaste for the product, with one user insisting they would just drink their coffee black if that was their only option. Another person wrote, "I got it once too. My coffee was upset with it."

The issue that many of the customers took with the product involved its ingredients. While it's marked as a fat-free version of half-and-half, one user questioned how the company could remove the fat without entirely changing the product, writing, "That makes no sense!" When it comes to fat-free half and half, there are several additives.

There's a good reason that you should never buy fat-free half-and-half. For the uninitiated, regular half-and-half is half whole milk and half heavy cream. As such it contains a good amount of fat (around 10.5% to 12%). This fat helps make coffee and other products both creamy and frothy. In comparison, fat-free half-and-half contains just one-tenth as much fat, meaning it requires& additional ingredients to replicate the texture of the original. As a result, many fat-free half-and-half products come loaded with both thickeners as well as artificial sweeteners like corn syrup. "Fat-free half-and-half strikes me as an absolutely unnecessary product," Mario Kratz, a dairy researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, told Time Magazine.

However, no one should tell you how to shop, so if you prefer the taste of fat-free half-and-half, go for it. One of the reasons that many Aldi shoppers are angry is that they accidentally picked up the fat-free version believing it was regular half-and-half. In a separate Reddit post, one user blasted Aldi for its similar packaging between the two products. The only notable difference was that the fat-free version had a purple label (with the words fat-free in small bold on the side) instead of pink. As one user wrote, "I've bought this by accident before. I think that's the only reason anyone has ever bought it."