Coffee and a cake at high street coffee shops can contain five times an adult’s sugar limit

To mark Sugar Awareness Week (November 13 -19), a survey by Action on Sugar has revealed over a third of sweet food and drink products sold in major high street coffee shops exceed an adult’s daily limit of sugar (30g for free sugars) in just one serve. The charity is calling for levies to be introduced to reduce sugar content and encourage transparent nutrition information.

More than one in two young adults is overweight and living with obesity, and one in three 25 to 34-year-olds are suffering from untreated tooth decay in the UK. Action on Sugar is calling for greater transparency over a 'scandalous' lack of nutrition information available at the point of purchase and new levies to be introduced to encourage healthier food and drink across the board.

Whilst certain companies are required, by law, to display the calorie content of food and drink at the point of purchase, details about the sugar content are often limited. The research reveals that 782 sweet food and drink products surveyed in nine leading high street coffee shops are insufficiently labelled for consumers. Over half would be marked 'red' (high in total sugars) if nutrition information was fully transparent. Astonishingly, just one food item (a Greggs All Butter Croissant) was low in sugar.

To put this into perspective, a visit to a coffee shop could see a person consume up to 39 teaspoons of sugar and a colossal 1,390 calories with one of the following food and drink combinations:

Table 1. Highest sugar per serving from a drink and sweet food combination per coffee shop

^a Some of the sugars in milk-based drinks will be from lactose in the milk, but current nutrition labelling does not differentiate between the amount of naturally occurring sugars (lactose) from milk and free sugars added in the form of table sugar, syrups and blended fruits.

^b Drink made with whole milk.
^c Drink made with semi-skimmed milk.

Despite the high amount of sugar found in the products surveyed, the difference in sugar content of similar products can vary widely (See table 2), illustrating the food and drink industry’s ability to reduce sugar if incentivised.

Table 2. Variation of sugars in similar products between coffee shops

*Medium sized drinks were chosen for comparison

The industry levies being proposed by Action on Sugar to encourage reformulation could include extending the current Soft Drinks Industry Levy (SDIL) across all juice and milk-based drinks and introducing levies targeting the high sugar content in sweet foods. Revenue generated from the levy can be invested back into children’s health.

Kawther Hashem, campaign lead at Action on Sugar, commented, "The use of levies is an effective lever to encourage companies to reduce sugar and calories in their products. The Soft Drinks Industry Levy is a key example of this, which successfully removed a massive 46,000 tonnes of sugar from these drinks as well as raising millions of pounds which has been invested in children’s health. We now need to see similar levies introduced across other categories to shift the market towards a healthier direction.”

Under the recent voluntary measures, the OOH sector has been unsuccessful in reducing sugar – with just a mere 0.2 per cent reduction overall compared to a more impressive 44 per cent decrease in average sugar added to soft drinks (as a result of the SDIL).

Graham MacGregor, professor of cardiovascular Medicine at Queen Mary University of London and chairman of Action on Sugar, said, “Whilst it is scandalous that companies get away with providing so little nutrition information, it is even more outrageous that the government hasn’t taken decisive action to incentivise sugar reduction. The need for mandatory nutrition labelling in the Out of Home sector and the introduction of new levies to encourage reformulation has never been more evident. Without doubt, an unhealthy diet high in saturated fat, salt and sugar, and low in fruit and vegetables, is the biggest cause of death and disability globally and costs the UK alone more than £100 billion annually. It’s time to redefine profit as a healthy population.”