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autoexec • yesterday at 6:59 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

The product could still be 60% sugar and contain 0% strawberries. It could be still be 60% sugar and contain 1% strawberries.

Sugar content doesn't tell you anything about berry content. It's not unreasonable for someone to want look at the list of ingredients and know if what they are buying is mostly fruit or mostly HFCS. Or even just mostly sugars that didn't come from the berries.


Replies

thaumasiotes • yesterday at 7:26 PM

The only problem here is that no part of your comment is true.

The strawberries are listed first, before any sugar component. That means they have to be more than 15% of the product.

In fact, the only other ingredients are fruit pectin (the gelling agent) and citric acid (flavor), both of which must be present at very low levels.¹

Strawberries are the entire rest of the ingredients list. And they're also 25% of the sugar content, which is 12g of sugar per serving of which 9g is "added sugar". There's nothing even slightly misleading about this.

¹ Here's a make-your-own-jam page with rules of thumb for pectin in jam: https://missvickie.com/jam-pectin-calculator/ .

The recommendation for strawberry jam is 4 tsp of dry pectin per 4 cups of added sugar. There are 3 tsp in one tablespoon and 16 tablespoons in one cup, for a pectin-to-added-sugar ratio of 1:48. This suggests the jam is under 1% pectin, and the citric acid is even less.

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