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Comment by KittenInABox | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what is the number of added sugars and above 50kcal peer 8 oz serving. You can get away with saying fruit drinks have no added sugar and still be insanely sugary.

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Fruit drinks have a neat trick to increase sugar content. Take apple juice for example: you can evaporate water out of it till it's a sugary syrup, then add it to regular apple juice, and it's still called "100% pure apple juice no sugar added".

(This is also done with various flavor essences from the juice, so they can recombine them in such a way as to produce a uniform flavor all throughout the year regardless of where the fruits are coming from.)

Not in the EU:

> It should be clearly indicated when a product is a mixture of fruit juice and fruit juice from concentrate

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A...

Are you saying that they couldn't say "100% fruit juice and no sugar added" on the label when the drink is a mixture of fruit juice and fruit juice from concentrate? What part of the regulation would prohibit this?

You can say "no added sugar" but you are forced to write it’s from a concentrate and it must be in the front of the product, not hidden somewhere.

Not perfect but at least you can’t just say it’s fruit juice.

You can call it a fruit drink though, have photos of berries on the package, and text like "juice from berries" and so forth. Very easy to mislead consumers - most orange juice in the EU is like this.

They could not. That would not pass the 'clearly indicated' in the quoted rule. There is also another more general rule which enforces a label of 'sweetened' or 'with added sugars' for any kind of sweetening agent including fruit concentrate:

> 4. For fruit juices which have been sweetened by the addition of sugars, the sales name shall include the word "sweetened" or "with added sugar", followed by an indication of the maximum quantity of sugar added, calculated as dry matter and expressed in grams per litre. [1]

> A claim stating that sugars have not been added to a food, and any claim likely to have the same meaning for the consumer, may only be made where the product does not contain any added mono- or disaccharides or any other food used for its sweetening properties. [2]

Coming from a country of impenetrable legalese everywhere, I find these regulations very refreshing, they are incredibly easy to read and always straight to the point.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A...

[2] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/memo_0...

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