It's Applejuiceification! You think you're drinking a healthy smoothie - in ... trends now
What’s the main ingredient of a Naked pineapple and passion fruit smoothie? You might think it was pineapple or passion fruit. Well, it isn’t. It is apple juice.
How about a Pret a Manger cold-pressed Hot Shot with a ‘warm burst of orange, spiced with turmeric, ginger and cayenne’? The main ingredient must be orange, right? Wrong, it is apple juice again.
It turns out that a huge number of fruit juices, smoothies, gut-boosting shots and cold-pressed drinks are made up predominantly of apple juice — even ones that never even mention the fruit on the front of the bottle.
Some have called it ‘Applejuiceification’: the fact that many of the fancy-sounding ingredients, different coloured labels and funky names for the drinks on our shelves hide the fact most are as much as 80 per cent apple juice.
One internet user found six different Innocent smoothie drinks to prove their point. The post went viral, with 19million viewers seeing it.
But it is not just Innocent — the drinks company now owned by Coca-Cola — that adopts this practice. Naked, part of the Tropicana stable, is also a huge user of apple juice; so, too, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Marks & Spencer.
All of the brands do it. Even the smaller, niche gourmet brands use predominantly apple juice. Mockingbird Raw Press, for instance, boasts about ‘harnessing the power of over 30 varieties of nutritionally rich fruit, veg and superfoods to carefully craft our award-winning recipe blends’, but many of their drinks consist of more than 50 per cent apple juice.
There is a reason for this — beyond the fact that apple juice is often cheaper than pineapple or passion fruit juice. And the reason is that apple juice is very sweet, usually containing about 10g of sugar per 100ml of juice. Full-sugar Coca Cola only contains slightly more, with 10.6g.
This means that any smoothie or gut-shot maker can say — truthfully that their products have ‘no added sugar’.
If you are using ginger, lemon, kale and spinach, add lots of apple juice and the end drink will end up tasting sweet, rather than like a whizzed-up salad.
Some manufacturers argue that many of their fruit-juice blends would taste too acidic without the addition of apple juice.
The downside for the consumer is that you are left with a product which contains a lot of sugar, but has only some of the nutritional benefit you would get if you ate the whole fruit.
Innocent Drinks said their reliance on apple juice was not a company-specific issue and referred the Daily Mail to the industry union, British Soft Drinks Association (BDSA).
A spokesperson for the BDSA says: ‘The use of apple juice as a base in some juice and smoothie products is common practice and has been for several decades, primarily to help balance the flavour . . . BSDA members comply with all relevant regulations and list ingredients on pack.’
So which fancy fruit drinks are made up of more apples than anything else? Here, the Mail pulls together a selection of products that all comprise more than 50 per cent apple juice:
Pret Hot Shot
‘Add a kick to your day with a burst of orange, spiced with tumeric, ginger and cayenne’ is how this tiny bottle is promoted on the shelf. Apple is not mentioned, but it makes up nearly two-thirds of the content.
Naked Ruby Machine Super Smoothie
This is red in colour and is described on the front of the bottle as ‘Raspberry, Pomegranate & Strawberry; Natural Energy boosted with B,C & E vitamins’. Apple, however, is the biggest ingredient, which explains why it has more sugar (11g) per 100ml than Coca-Cola.
Naked Pineapple & Passion fruit smoothie
‘Full of delicious punchy and exotic flavours,’ it says on the Naked website. That may be so, but the main ingredient is apple ‘partially from concentrate’. With 11g of sugar per 100ml, a serving contains the equivalent of 4 teaspoons of sugar.
Naked Gold Machine Super Smoothie
‘This super smoothie is packed with tropical passionfruit, mango, and guava. It’s a colourful blend that tastes like sunshine,’ the Naked website says. Apple is not mentioned, but it is the biggest ingredient by some margin. And at 11g per 100ml, it too contains more sugar than Coca-Cola.
Innocent Apple & Raspberry
Innocent clearly labels this as an apple-based drink. There is no subterfuge here. But some consumers might be surprised that the bottle is almost entirely apple juice, at 92 per cent. One Meal Deal-sized bottle, as a result, contains 32g of sugar, double the amount found in a can of Sprite or Fanta (both of which have
