A pouch says “no added sugar” on the front. Turn it over and the second ingredient is apple juice concentrate.
Both of those things are true at the same time. That’s the part that makes it hard — a parent checking the label is doing exactly the right thing and still coming away with two answers that don’t match. This is about which one is answering which question, and what to read instead.
The ingredients list is ordered, and the order tells you something
Food Standards Australia New Zealand requires ingredients to be listed in descending order by ingoing weight — most to least, measured at the time the food was made. That’s Standard 1.2.4 of the Food Standards Code.
“Ingoing” is doing quiet work in that sentence. The order reflects what went into the mixing vessel, not what’s left in the pouch after processing. Water driven off during cooking doesn’t have to be declared if it isn’t meaningfully present at the end.
For everyday reading, the useful part is simpler: whatever sits at position two on that list was one of the largest things in the recipe. If that’s a juice concentrate, there was more of it than of most of the fruit named on the front.
”Added sugar” and “free sugars” are two different vocabularies
Here’s where the contradiction comes from. “No added sugar” is a labelling claim. It’s answering a narrow question — was a recognisable sugar ingredient added? Cane sugar, glucose syrup, that sort of thing.
Nutrition guidance asks a wider question, and uses a different word for it. The World Health Organization defines free sugars as monosaccharides and disaccharides added by a manufacturer, cook or consumer, plus the sugars naturally present in honey, syrups, fruit juices and fruit juice concentrates.
Fruit juice concentrate is named in that definition explicitly. Once fruit has been pressed and concentrated, the sugar has been released from the structure of the fruit, and WHO counts it the same way it counts sugar from a bag.
The WHO guideline recommends reducing free sugars, and it’s worth knowing what it doesn’t cover: sugars in whole fresh fruit and vegetables, and sugars naturally present in milk, are outside it — there’s no evidence base for treating those the same way. A whole pear and a pear juice concentrate are not the same object, nutritionally or in the guidance.
So a pouch can carry “no added sugar” accurately, under the labelling rules, while containing free sugars under the nutrition definition. Nobody is lying. The two systems are answering different questions and only one of them is printed on the front.
| ”No added sugar” (labelling claim) | “Free sugars” (WHO definition) | |
|---|---|---|
| Cane sugar, glucose syrup | Counted | Counted |
| Fruit juice concentrate | Not counted | Counted |
| Honey and syrups | Not counted | Counted |
| Sugars in whole fruit and veg | Not counted | Not counted |
| Sugars naturally in milk | Not counted | Not counted |
The gap between those two columns is the entire story.
How often this happens in Australia
It isn’t a rare edge case.
A 2023 analysis in BMC Public Health, “The big squeeze”, examined 276 ready-to-use infant food pouches from 15 manufacturers sold in Australia, aimed at infants from four months and up. The researchers found that claims of “no added sugar” were made for 59% of pouches, despite the addition of free sugars.
The rest of their measurements are worth having in your head next time you’re standing in that aisle:
- Total sugar content ranged from 0.8 to 17.5 g per 100 g across the products.
- 20% of products (56) contained added sugars.
- 17% (46) had added fruit juice.
- 71% (196) had added fruit purée.
That last number is the one most people find surprising. Purée is the default construction of this category, not an occasional shortcut.
The four-second check
None of this makes the label useless. It makes the front of the pack the wrong part to read.
Turn the pouch over and read four things:
- The first three ingredients — that’s the bulk of what’s in there.
- Any of these words in them — concentrate, juice, syrup, nectar, purée.
- The sugars line on the nutrition information panel, in g per 100 g.
- The product name against the ingredients order — is the fruit on the front near the top of the list, or near the bottom?
That’s it. The longer version of each, if you want it:
Read the first three ingredients. They’re the bulk of what’s in there. If a juice or a concentrate is among them, the front-of-pack claim is answering a narrower question than the one you’re asking.
Watch for the words that signal a free sugar. Concentrate, juice, syrup, nectar, purée. Purée sits in a genuinely grey area — it retains more of the fruit’s structure than juice does — but it’s still worth noticing when it’s the first thing listed.
Check the sugars line on the nutrition information panel. It gives you grams per 100 g, which is comparable between products in a way that front-of-pack words are not. Two pouches making identical claims can be several grams apart.
Compare the product name to the ingredients order. If the front says “pear and spinach” and spinach appears seventh, the name is describing the flavour, not the composition.
The short version
“No added sugar” is a true statement about a narrow thing. It isn’t a summary of the pouch, and it was never meant to be one.
The ingredients list, read top-down, is the part of the packet that has to tell you what’s actually in there — and it takes about four seconds to read once you know the order means something.
Peeka is being built to do this reading for you, against your own child’s details. Want this in an app? Join the waitlist.
General information, not medical advice. Chat with your GP or child health nurse.