Fruit purée: producers are stingy with key ingredient vegetables

Fruit purée in bags is well received amongst the kids. But even when the bag says "entirely without added sugars", most products are by themselves just as sweet as the fruit dwarfs. Out of 16 "fruit squashes", only a single product was "good".

Yes, fruit is healthy. And so is fruit purée. But it is also naturally very sweet - according to types with sugar contents that are comparable to a fruit dwarf. That is initially not questionable, because the vitamins and fibres that are in and below the skin are so valuable, that the contained fruit sugar is totally alright as an "additional extra". However, there are ways to increase the natural sugar content: entirely natural, without additional crystal sugar. We wanted to know exactly what can be expected from the different "fruit squashes", and have sent 16 to the laboratory.

The rest results
To squash the nonsense: only one bag makes it to "good". All others we can either not recommend, or only limitedly recommend. Five products flopped in the test: for the criteria of pesticides, concentrates, fruit sweetness and faulty declaration, we can only give an "insufficient". Also disappointing: Danival Poki Bio Pomme bananas - an organic product, in which the laboratory that we assigned the task to found pesticide residues that were above food regulations and the orientation value set by the Bundesverband Naturkost Naturwaren (BNN). That makes the product all but organic.

The average sugar content of an apple or pear is at around 10 grams per 100 grams. Some of the purées contain 16 to almost 18 grams - most products advertise with "without additional sugar" or similar promises. This cheating is easy to unveil: five producers add hidden sugars to the tested fruit. We take Odenwald Pocket Fruchtmus with apple, strawberry, banana - the sweetest purée in the test. All pure fruit sugar - but converted it is almost six sugar cubes in a bag. Trick number 1: apple juice concentrate. Trick number 2: grape juice concentrate. And because that is obviously not enough, Odenwald resorts to trick number 3: fruit sweetness.

Result: Stolzee 17 grams of sugar per 100 grams - about as much as two Milchschnitte (type of German chocolate bars) (16.6 grams) or in a 0.2 litre glass of Fanta (18.4 grams) and even almost two sugar cubes more than in a 100 grams of fruit dwarfs (12.8 grams). In other fruit purées, acerola juice concentrate makes the vitamin C content skyrocket.

Source: ÖKO-TEST