Dallas May Not Have an Erewhon, But It Does Have a Smoothie King Drink Created by Influencers
What does influence taste like? Turns out, it tastes pretty sweet, and looks very blue-green. Like blue spirulina, to be specific.
“All five of us attempted to come up with our own blend for the Dude Perfect smoothie. In the end, my tasty creation was the winner. Brain freeze was only a minor setback in the process!”
Lori Primavera, head of research and development at Smoothie King says the five “Dudes’’ were already fans of the chain from their college days at Texas A&M when they came to the company headquarters. The Smoothie King R&D team got them behind the smoothie bar and they started experimenting.
Primavera says that together with the Smoothie King team, the Dudes “created and tasted a lot of smoothies in the Test Kitchen that day,” but it was when someone added the blue spirulina that they said, “that is the color our smoothie needs to be.”
True to influencer instincts, they determined how they wanted the final blend to look even before nailing down the ingredients. And the process was not all smooth sailing. “There was one version with strawberry that turned the blend kinda brownish purple, which wasn’t too appetizing,” Primavera says.
Eater also reached out to the Dude Perfect team, who were out of the country, so Coby Cotton answered our questions via email. When we asked how many different blends the team tried in the course of their smoothie quest, and whether brain freeze was an issue, Cotton replied, “All five of us attempted to come up with our own blend for the Dude Perfect smoothie. In the end, my tasty creation was the winner. Brain freeze was only a minor setback in the process!”
The team tried creating a chocolatey version, but felt it was too basic. “The dudes definitely wanted it to stand out,” Primavera says. “They had to think about wide approval,” she says. “This one had too much pineapple, that one didn’t have enough banana, etcetera.” Eventually, the group used a tournament-style process to land a recipe. “Tyler may or may not have tried to use potatoes,” Cotton says. Eventually, the team decided on a recipe they thought everyone would love.
In the end, that winning combo – dubbed the Dude Perfect Smoothie – is a combination of “pineapples, bananas, kiwi-apple juice, a protein blend, vanilla frozen yogurt, turbinado,” and the aforementioned blue spirulina, that delivers a whopping 14 grams of protein. (Suck on that, Erewhon.) The banana, protein powder, and yogurt are the most notable flavors, but overall it tastes like a typical Smoothie King product. Nothing that’ll knock the peels off your bananas, in other words.