The Badge on the Front Isn't the Whole Story: Reading UK Sugar Labels in 2026

Walk down any supermarket aisle this month and you'll meet them: the cereal bars with a cheerful 'no added sugar' roundel, the kids' fruit drinks promising no nasties, the yogurts that cost 40p more because the word 'natural' is doing a lot of heavy lifting on the lid. None of it is a lie, exactly. It's just that a claim on the front of a pack answers a much narrower question than the one most of us are actually asking.

So let's take the badge apart, gently, and put a practical check in your hands instead.

What 'no added sugar' is actually promising

UK nutrition claims are governed by retained food information regulations, and the rule for this one is fairly narrow: a product labelled 'no added sugar' can't have had any sugar added during manufacture, and that includes anything else added specifically for its sweetening power. If the food naturally contains sugar, the pack has to say so — look for the small print 'contains naturally occurring sugars'.

What the claim never tells you is how much sugar is in the product overall. A date-and-walnut bar can carry the badge honestly and still land 18g of sugar on your desk, because every gram of it arrived inside the dates. That's not a scandal. It's just a different question from the one you thought you asked.

The same goes for 'unsweetened' (nothing sweet-tasting added), 'reduced sugar' (at least 30% less than a comparable product — which could still be a lot) and 'no refined sugar', which isn't a regulated claim at all and can mean almost anything.

Fruit juice concentrate: the sweetener with a halo

Concentrate is the ingredient that confuses people most, and understandably. Added purely to sweeten a product, it counts as added sugar under the claim rules — so you shouldn't find it on a genuine 'no added sugar' label. What you will find it on is packaging shouting 'naturally sweetened', 'made with real fruit' or 'no refined sugar'. Those phrases aren't tightly defined, and concentrate is a serious source of sugar once rehydrated: a fruit juice drink can easily carry as much sugar per 100ml as a cola.

This doesn't make fruit juice the enemy. A small glass with breakfast is a normal thing to do. It's worth knowing, though, that a juice drink sweetened with concentrate is closer to a soft drink than to a punnet of strawberries — and pricing often reflects the marketing, not the nutrition.

Honey, agave, coconut sugar: natural, yes. Still free sugars.

NHS guidance is to keep free sugars — the ones added to food, plus those in honey, syrups, juices and smoothies — to no more than 30g a day for adults. That's roughly seven teaspoons, and it adds up faster than most of us expect.

A tablespoon of honey carries about 17g of sugar. Coconut sugar is, gram for gram, pretty much table sugar with a nicer story. Agave is a touch higher in fructose and no kinder to your teeth. Your body doesn't grade sweetness by how rustic the jar looks, and that's fine — it just means the ingredient list matters more than the font.

The three-step supermarket check

You don't need an app or a nutrition degree. You need about sixty seconds.

Step one: turn the pack over. Find the nutrition table and read the per 100g column, not the per-serving one. Front-of-pack traffic lights are voluntary in the UK but widely used, and the thresholds are consistent: more than 22.5g of sugar per 100g is a red light (11.25g per 100ml for drinks), while 5g or less per 100g is green (2.5g per 100ml). Comparing per 100g keeps you honest when a 'serving' turns out to be three bites.

Step two: skim the ingredients. They're listed by weight, so the first three tell you a lot. Look out for anything ending in -ose, any syrup (glucose-fructose, invert, rice, malt), honey, malt extract and juice concentrates. You don't need to be frightened of these words. You need to notice them, especially when two or three appear in the same list.

Step three: ask what else you're getting. This is the step most label guides skip, and it's the most useful. A bar with 18g of sugar alongside 5g of fibre and 7g of protein is a very different midday snack from a jelly with 18g of sugar and nothing else. Food is a package deal. Judge the whole package.

Where the claim genuinely earns its keep

Plenty of everyday staples use 'no added sugar' honestly and helpfully: plain natural yogurt, porridge oats, tinned tomatoes, shredded wheat, canned fruit in juice, most peanut butters. In those cases the badge is a decent shortcut and worth the few seconds it saves.

And remember that the most convincing no-added-sugar label in the shop is a bag of carrots, which doesn't bother printing one. Whole foods rarely need to advertise.

The supportive bottom line

None of this is a reason to stand in the aisle feeling guilty about a flapjack. Sugar isn't poison, and a November afternoon with a cup of tea and something sweet is one of the better parts of being British. The illusion worth pushing back on is the idea that a badge on the front settles the question.

Turn the pack over. Read four ingredients. Glance at the traffic lights. Then buy the thing you actually wanted, knowing what's in it — and spend the money you saved on the overpriced 'wellness' version on a decent bag of frozen berries instead.