Damian was round the other day, and with his tired hat on (as much as his business journalist hat) he was commenting on the sugar content of an Innocent smoothie. He referred to it as a great ‘sugar hit’ — which didn’t feel right to me, not when compared with the sugary soft drinks I’ve made a cursory study of. After all, there’s a heckuva lot of sugar in a can of coke.

So I looked into it.

By my estimations – natural sugars or otherwise – there is the equivalent of a can of coke’s sugar in the same volume of strawberry and banana smoothie – around 8 teaspoons. Of course the smoothie bottle is marginally smaller than a coke can – but it’s still pretty high! Innocent describes this as:

The amount of sugars in a 250ml serving of our smoothies averages at 29g or a third of your daily requirement. Or, put more simply, the same amount of sugars that you’d find in a banana and another portion of fruit (which makes sense, as smoothies are two of your 5-a-day portions).

Which makes it sound much better, but this is one of those things we in the trade call ‘positioning’. Not sure it helps that much here, or if there’s anything they can do about it given that they pulp fruit straight into the bottle (apparently).

So chalk this one up to one of those occasions when Damo is bang on about something, and take a care when next you hit up Innocent for a smoothie. Those things are sugar-tastic, and probably not great for diabetics.