New product Wednesday, at Dallas stores: Breyers Pure Fruit Pomegranate Popsicles

by Teresa Gubbins

Breyers versus Dreyer's, it never ends. The latest face-off: frozen fruit bars.

These are basically big-corporation versions of the Mexican paleta.

Dreyer's came first, years ago, with its Fruit Bars line. Those are good, but they sortof peaked a few years ago. Still, there's plenty of meat on the bone, so last year, Breyers copycatted with a competitive product called "Pure Fruit."

This year, Breyers is hitting the pomegranate angle: Pomegranate Blends. There are three flavors -- 1. pomegranate blueberry 2. pomegranate mango 3. pomegranate mixed berry -- though I defy you to sample them blind-folded and taste the difference, other than the noticeably smoother texture of the mango.

The box plasters as many buzzwords as it can fit without turning into a graphics nightmare, including pomegranate, natural, antioxidant, and Vitamin C. On the back of the box is where you can read some of the ingredients including water, fructose, fruit puree, pomegranate juice from concentrate, apple puree, some other juice-type stuff, citric acid, pectin, guar gum, and carob bean gum.

And while it is peachy that they are 40 calories each, that's for a single-stick bar, about half the size of a Popsicle. For an innocuous dose of cold and sweet, these are fine. How's that for lukewarm.

Still, it's cool to see new stuff in the supermarket freezer case. Here comes summer.