Sugar in Our Food – Facts From Food Package Labels

We design food package labels which means we’re very familiar with nutrition information labels and their legal requirements. In our work we also need to be aware of trends in food and products, the most widely promoted of these recently is the amount of sugar in packaged foods and the general desire to reduce how much sugar we consume.

With this in mind we decided to check out the food labels on a range of supermarket products and report back with some sugar facts. 

We all know jam is made with a lot of sugar but why does tomato ketchup contain so much sugar? Especially when a tomato has less than 3% sugar.

At 12% soft drinks don’t contain as much sugar as we thought. That said, a 300ml glass of soda contains the equivalent of 11 teaspoons of sugar, that’s six times more sugar that the jam on your toast.

There’s a common assumption that bread has a lot of sugar but at 3% it isn’t that much, but does there need to be any sugar in bread at all?

Breakfast cereals have significantly different amounts of sugar ranging from 3% to 32%. For example Weet-bix have 3% while Nutrigrains have 32%. It’s definitely worth reading the nutrition information when buying cereals if you’re trying to cut down on your sugar intake.

Note: The percentages illustrated are an average taken from a sample of brands for each product. The product brands shown in the illustration are for demonstrative purposes only and the brand may not contain the exact percentage of sugar shown on the illustration.

Posted 21 May 2015