Sydney Sweeney’s new Blueberry Syrn joins Hailey Bieber and Kendall Jenner in the celebrity Erewhon smoothie boom. But between the calories, sugar, and hodgepodge of ingredients, are these drinks actually healthy?
Sydney Sweeney would like to sell you a blueberry muffin in liquid form for roughly the price of a paperback, and the strange part is how completely reasonable that has come to seem. On August 6, the actress debuted the Blueberry Syrn at the Los Angeles grocery chain Erewhon — a violet-and-white swirl that its makers say tastes like a classic blueberry muffin, with a portion of proceeds going to Pink Ribbon Good, a nonprofit that supports women and families affected by breast and gynecological cancers. Sweeney promoted it with the self-aware humor of someone who understands exactly what she is participating in, and the internet responded the way it always does, which is to say instantly and at volume.
The recipe for the $22 smoothie reads like a pitch deck for a supplement startup. There is Malk organic almond milk, blueberries, acai, and almond butter, which is the part a reasonable person would anticipate. Then there is Ancient Nutrition vanilla bone broth protein alongside Erewhon’s organic A2 whey protein, which means a single cup runs on two separate protein systems, plus pitaya and blue spirulina whipped creams and a garnish of organic vegan coconut “bacon.” It is a lot of ingredients, stacked the way a fragrance is stacked, and it revives the question that shadows every drink in this genre. This is either health food or it is dessert wearing health food’s outfit, and the difference matters quite a bit.
Sweeney is joining a lineage that is already crowded and lucrative. Hailey Bieber’s Strawberry Skin Glaze, the drink that arguably invented the format, reportedly sells 40,000 units a month at $21 each. Olivia Rodrigo’s Good 4 Ur Guts went for $18, Miranda Kerr’s Kora Organics collaboration for $19n, and Kendall Jenner’s probiotic Peachy smoothie topped the field at $23. Each one arrives with a charitable tie-in, a photogenic color, and a shopping list of functional ingredients most customers could not define under oath.
How many calories are in a celebrity Erewhon smoothie?
Erewhon does not publish full nutrition information for these limited-run collaborations, which is its own kind of tell. What can be measured suggests the drinks belong closer to the meal category than the beverage one. The chain’s Strawberry Glaze smoothie has been logged at nearly 600 calories, with 113 grams of carbohydrate, 17 grams of fat, and 18 grams of protein per cup. For a point of comparison, a 12-ounce can of Coca-Cola, the beverage that wellness culture has spent a generation casting as the villain, contains 140 calories and 39 grams of sugar.
By that math, a single strawberry smoothie carries roughly the calories of four cans of Coke and nearly triple the carbohydrates of one, delivered with a halo of collagen and sea moss rather than a red aluminum can. The soda gets treated as a moral failing while the smoothie gets touted as the epitome of wellness. Both can be true at once, though: the smoothie contains real fruit, real protein, and real fat that a soda never will, and it also asks the body to process a meal’s worth of sugar in the time it takes to drive home from the store.
“People are shocked when I tell them their ‘healthy’ smoothie might be messing with their blood sugar,” Carrie Lupoli, a nutritionist, told Delish. “A lot of pre-made or trendy blends are basically just sugar bombs — and when they’re missing key nutrients, you end up feeling hungrier or totally drained an hour later.” The crash Lupoli describes is the part that never makes it into the launch content.
Can you drink too many smoothies?
The experts who study these drinks tend not to condemn the smoothie so much as the assumption behind it, which is that blending something makes it automatically good for a person. “A smoothie can be a fantastic addition to your daily diet, but it all comes down to the ingredients you use and your overall nutritional needs,” Lauren Manaker, M.S., R.D.N., told Delish. The complication is subtle and physical. A drink slips past the body’s fullness signals in a way that the same fruit, eaten whole and chewed, does not, which is how a person can consume 600 calories and still feel entitled to lunch an hour later.
None of this makes the daily smoothie a mistake. It makes it a decision that rewards attention. “When it’s thoughtfully made and part of a balanced diet, it can absolutely be a healthy daily habit,” said Dr. Cristina Del Toro Badessa, a wellness physician and director at Artisan Beauté, said. Her tell for whether a blend is working is refreshingly low-tech: “Pay attention to how you feel afterward. If you’re crashing or still hungry, the blend may need adjusting.” A smoothie that leaves someone jittery and foraging is a smoothie doing the opposite of its job, regardless of whose name is on the cup.
Do the fancy smoothie ingredients actually do anything?
The other thing customers are buying, alongside calories and a celebrity association, is the promise buried in the ingredient list. Sweeney’s Blueberry Syrn runs two proteins and a pair of whipped creams; the broader Erewhon menu leans on adaptogens, sea moss, collagen, and spirulina, each carrying an implied benefit that rarely comes with a dose. That vagueness is precisely what the dietitians flag. “In smoothies packed with so many different ingredients, we don’t know how much of each one is actually being added,” Dawn Menning, a dietitian, told AOL, which turns most functional claims into an act of faith.
Even when the ingredient is legitimate, the format may not be enough to deliver it. “Adaptogens and superfoods generally need to be consumed regularly and in specific amounts to see significant effects, and a single smoothie may not deliver that level of concentration,” Catherine Gervacio, a diet consultant at WowMD, explained to AOL. A one-time $20 drink is many things, most of them fun, but a clinical dose of anything is not usually among them.
Which returns matters to Sweeney, standing in an Erewhon with a blueberry-muffin smoothie and a genuinely good cause attached to it. The Blueberry Syrn will sell, because the format works and the timing is right and the drink apparently tastes terrific. Whether it makes anyone healthier is a separate question from whether it makes anyone happy, and the smoothie was only ever engineered to answer the second one. “Pay attention to how you feel afterward,” Del Toro Badessa said. It remains the most useful instruction anyone has given about a drink named after a movie star.
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