Spar Austria has announced that it has cut 200 tonnes of sugar from 41 of its private-label lemonades and iced teas since the beginning of 2017.
At the start of last year, the retailer said it would work to reduce the amount of sugar in its own-label product lines, and pledged to cut 1,000 tonnes of sugar by reformulating recipes by 2020. In February, it celebrated the reduction of sugar in 50 such products.
Sugar content has been a hot health topic in recent years, with several countries such as the UK and Ireland introducing a sugar tax, exacting higher tariffs on items that contain higher amounts of sugar.
'Consumers are increasingly turning to drinks that contain less sugar and taste less sweet. Spar has reviewed the Spar own-brand products in terms of sugar-saving potential and since the beginning of 2017 has already extracted sugar from more than 100 products,’ the company said in a statement.
'Conscious Nutrition'
Calling itself a ‘pioneer of conscious nutrition’, Spar said that it had identified unnecessary amounts of sugar in its products and that it was working to reduce these levels. The retailer said that 300 more private-label products will be examined and reformulated in the next one to two years.
For example, the newly reformulated Spar Herbal Soda contains only 8.1g/100 ml of sugar, as compared to 9.3g/100 ml in the original recipe. The Spar Fresh Orange drink dropped from 10 g/100 ml to 8.6g/100 ml.
"Consumers are demanding less sweet lemonade, iced tea... We have therefore been working intensively on the topic of sugar in beverages and have been able to reduce the sugar content in numerous Spar own-brand drinks," Spar Austria CEO Gerhard Drexel commented.
"All in all, since the beginning of 2017 we have saved about 200 tonnes of sugar, of course without the use of artificial sweeteners," he added.
The company said it is promoting reduced-sugar drinks from other brands as well, such as the green tea 'trend' drink from Inspiriti, sweetened with agave syrup.
© 2017 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Karen Henderson. Click subscribe to sign up to ESM: European Supermarket Magazine.
