Did You Know This About Coffee Creamer?

  I don't know about you but where I work, they have a huge container of powdered coffee creamer while some folks have their private stash of their favorite flavored liquid coffee creamer.  My mother sticks to her milk but I've always wondered what coffee creamer actually is.  Before that though, did you know coffee creamer in one form or another has been around since the mid 19th century?

It first appeared in France as an evaporated milk product.  By the 1860's it was being used world wide.  In 1952, "Pream" a dairy based creamer consisting of dried cream and sugar .  Unfortunately this product did not dissolve well in liquids.  In the early 1950's scientists began experimenting with non-dairy versions.  In 1958, Carnation marketed the first easily dissolving coffee creamer.  You know it - Coffee Mate.

Coffee creamers in general are not healthy because they are made of oils or fats (often hydrogenated), sweetner, and other ingredients such as stabilizers.  Although it does not have much transfat in it, if you drink it in several cups a day it will add up and could increase your risks for certain things.

Coffee creamers are used in ways you'd never think of.  For instance, it is found in ice cream production, in seasonings, in instant cereal and powdered drinks, along with instant noodles, soups and bakery products. Very mundane but did you know that it is often used in the film industry as fake snow?

Its has some interesting cleaning powers.  If you mix it with water and soak your fabric in it to whiten it.  It is also used to de-foam fishing tanks in the fishing industry.  Wow!

There is one more use for it that makes me rather nervous.  Some varieties of coffee creamer are combustible so Hollywood film techs use it to create explosions because it is a cheap, reliable explosive.

I hope you enjoyed reading about coffee creamer and that you learned something new.