How to Read a Dried Fruit Label Properly
Per-100g figures make dried fruit look alarming. Here's how to interpret them without either panicking or being misled.
A customer emailed us last month, concerned: our mango showed 62g of sugar per 100g. Was this really a no-added-sugar product? It was a completely fair question, and the answer is a useful lesson in reading labels.
Removing water concentrates everything
Fresh mango is roughly 83% water. Take that water away and you are left with about 17g of solids from every 100g of fruit — and all of the sugar, fibre, vitamins and minerals that were dissolved in it are now packed into that 17g.
So 100g of dried mango is not 100g of mango. It is closer to 550g of fresh mango. The sugar figure is high because the fruit is concentrated, not because anything was added.
Why fibre changes the picture
Sugar bound up in an intact fibre matrix behaves very differently in the body from the same amount of free sugar in a soft drink. The fibre slows gastric emptying and blunts the rise in blood glucose. Dried fruit keeps its fibre; fruit juice does not.
- Dried mango: ~62g sugar, ~5g fibre per 100g, eaten in ~30g portions
- Fruit juice: ~10g sugar, ~0g fibre per 100ml, drunk in 250ml servings
- The juice looks better per 100g and is considerably worse in practice
Portion is the real control
A sensible portion of dried fruit is 25–40g — a small handful, or roughly four to five mango slices. At that size you are eating around 20g of sugar alongside meaningful fibre, potassium and vitamin A. That is a reasonable snack, not a health emergency.
“Dried fruit is concentrated fruit. Treat the portion accordingly and the maths works out fine.”
Keep reading
Why We Never Add Sugar
Most dried fruit on the shelf is candy in disguise. Here's what we found when we started reading labels — and why we build ours differently.
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