Anybody else experiencing sugar packets with non-sugar white powder in them instead?
At a local restaurant I ordered regular tea because they don't have sweet tea. Emptied a sugar packet in and stirred fifty times with the table knife (nobody has those long-handled iced-tea spoons any more!)
Took a drink and it wasn't sweet, not a particle, not one iota of sweetness. What gives?
No sugar crystals on the bottom of the cup, which are always there because cold beverages don't dissolve sugar well.
What's happening?
I dumped another sugar packet in and watched - it rained down and ... disappeared!
So, it isn't sugar. Dumping some in my hand, wetting a fingertip and dabbing, get a taste and ... nothing. No sweetness.
The packets were marked SysCo, so that doesn't tell my anything.
I'm kind of worried. Somebody substituted some white powder for sugar, sold it to SysCo, who distributed it to unsuspecting millions. Is it just corn starch? Something more sinister? Is it edible at all? Am I gonna get sick?
Concerned in Iowa.
You might have recently had a mild cold/flu/covid infection that left you with a diminished sense of taste that day.
The time it takes sugar to dissolve is affected by a lot of things, including the size of the granules, which might have been closer to powdered sugar than the much larger crystals you're used to seeing in restaurant packets. Just because your drink was cold doesn't mean sugar can't very quickly dissolve in it.
If you're genuinely concerned about this, get a sample of it and send it to a chem lab for testing. That's going to be the easiest way to get evidence worthy of the claim you're making ("it isn't sugar").