Walk down any drinks aisle and you'll see four or five different sugar claims, all in confident fonts, all meaning slightly different things.
Most shoppers read them as interchangeable. They aren't, and the differences are worth about two minutes of your time because they apply to everything you buy, not just drinks.
The three claims you'll actually see
No added sugar means no sugar was added during manufacturing. Any sugar in the product came along with the ingredients — usually from fruit or milk.
Sugar-free is a claim about the total amount in the finished product, regardless of origin. It's a stricter bar.
Low sugar is a relative claim, and the reference point is often left vague. Low compared to what?
So a fruit juice can honestly say no added sugar while containing plenty of sugar, because fruit is sweet. That isn't a loophole. It's two different things being measured, described accurately, and read carelessly.
Where juice complicates everything
This trips up more people than anything else on a label.
Whole fruit comes with fibre, and fibre slows down how quickly your body absorbs the sugar. Juice removes most of that fibre. Same sugar, faster absorption.
That's why nutritionists tend to be more relaxed about an orange than a glass of orange juice, even though the juice has technically no added sugar. The claim is true and the impression it creates is a bit generous.
Uncanned has real juice in it, so it isn't sugar-free and we don't describe it that way. What we don't do is add sugar on top.
Two habits that cut through most of it
Check the serving size before the numbers. This is the single most useful thing you can do. A 500ml bottle listing nutrition "per 100ml" is showing you a fifth of what you're about to drink. Multiply before you judge.
Read the ingredients list, not the front of the pack. Ingredients are listed by weight, heaviest first. If a sweetener appears in the first three, it's a major component regardless of what the front says.
Sugar also travels under a lot of names. Sucrose, glucose syrup, fructose, invert sugar, maltodextrin, fruit juice concentrate, honey, jaggery. Splitting sugar across several of these pushes each one further down the list while the total stays the same.
On artificial sweeteners
If a drink is sweet but has no sugar, something else is doing the work. Usually sucralose, aspartame, stevia or a blend. Ours uses steviol glycosides, which is the stevia one — we’d rather say so here than have you discover it on the back of the can.
These are approved as safe by regulators including FSSAI, and the "safe" question is fairly settled. The interesting questions are different ones — whether very sweet non-sugar drinks keep your palate calibrated to expect intense sweetness, and whether some sweeteners affect gut bacteria. Research is ongoing and honest people disagree.
We're not going to pretend that's resolved. If a brand tells you sweeteners are definitely fine or definitely terrible, they're ahead of the evidence in one direction or the other.
What to actually do with this
You don't need to become a label obsessive. Three checks cover most of it:
Look at grams of sugar per actual serving, not per 100ml.
Scan the first three ingredients.
Be sceptical of any front-of-pack claim that doesn't have a number behind it somewhere.
That's it. Not because brands are out to get you — most of this is standard practice and entirely legal — but because knowing what the words mean turns the front of a pack into information rather than decoration.
A worked example
Say you're holding a 500ml bottle. The label reads 4.5g sugar per 100ml, and the front says "no added sugar."
Both facts are accurate. Together they mean 22.5g of sugar in the bottle — around five and a half teaspoons, and close to a full day's recommended added-sugar allowance, even though technically none was added.
Nothing dishonest has happened. The maths just wasn't done for you, and the serving size was chosen so it wouldn't be obvious.
That single check — multiply per-100ml by the actual volume — catches more than any other habit on this list.
What the rules actually say in India
FSSAI sets thresholds for these claims rather than leaving them to interpretation.
"Sugar-free" requires no more than 0.5g of sugar per 100g or 100ml. "Low sugar" has its own defined ceiling. "No added sugar" means exactly what it says — none added during processing — and carries no limit on what was already there.
So the claims are regulated. What isn't regulated is the impression they create when read quickly in a supermarket aisle, which is where most of us do our reading.
The short checklist
Multiply the per-100ml figure by the real volume. Read the first three ingredients. Note whether a number appears anywhere near the claim on the front.
Three checks, about fifteen seconds. It won't turn you into a nutritionist, but it means the pack tells you what you think it's telling you.
