Sugar, Syrup, and Sweeteners on a Flavored Milk Drink Label
Introduction: A flavored milk drink can list sugar, syrup, and high-intensity sweeteners on the same bottle because each one does a different job in the formula. Stand in a drinks aisle and turn a strawberry milk-flavored bottle around. The ingredient list opens with water, then high fructose corn syrup, then white sugar, and somewhere near the bottom, tucked inside a food additive bracket, you meet saccharin, aspartame, and sucralose. That combination confuses a lot of label readers. If sweeteners are in there, why is there also sugar? Does the sweetener cancel the sugar out? The short answer is no, and the reason is simpler than it looks. Sweetness in a bottled drink can come from several sources at once, and each name on that list tells you something different about how much of it is there and what it is doing. Why Flavored Milk Drinks Often Use More Than One Sweet Source Sweetness in a bottled drink is not a single dial. A formulator balances how sweet the drink tastes, how quick...