Updated April 2026 · 9 min read
Sugar by another name: 40+ terms to look for on UK food labels
Sugar appears on UK labels under dozens of different names — a deliberate quirk of how ingredients are listed, which allows a product built around sweetness to push the word “sugar” further down the order. Here is the working glossary of everything that means sugar, grouped so you can spot the category at a glance, plus the UK rules on what’s actually required on the pack.
Why one sugar becomes five sugars on the label
Under UK food labelling law (retained EU Regulation 1169/2011), ingredients must be listed in order of weight, largest first. If sugar is the biggest single ingredient in a product, “sugar” has to sit at the top of the list — which, for a cereal or a sauce, is a visible problem for the manufacturer. The workaround is to use several different sweetening ingredients. A cereal might contain sugar, glucose syrup, honey, and fruit juice concentrate in separate quantities, each small enough to push behind “oats”, “wheat”, or “whole grain” in the list. Added up, they’re still sugar.
The back-of-pack nutrition panel catches this by aggregating everything into a single “of which sugars” figure. The trick is spotting it on the ingredients list, where a family of different names can hide what a single entry on the nutrition table reveals.
Group 1 — The “-ose” family (the chemical names)
The suffix “-ose” is the giveaway that a name is chemically a sugar. Almost every simple sugar in food ends this way.
- Sucrose — ordinary table sugar (a molecule of glucose + fructose). What most people think of as “sugar”.
- Glucose — the simplest sugar, the form your bloodstream runs on.
- Fructose — the sugar naturally found in fruit and honey; often added in isolated form.
- Dextrose — another name for glucose, particularly in its crystallised form.
- Lactose — milk sugar. Doesn’t count as a free sugar in dairy; does when added to other products.
- Maltose — malt sugar, produced during the malting of grains.
- Galactose — a component of lactose, sometimes added separately.
- Ribose — found in some sports products; chemically a sugar.
- Trehalose — a disaccharide used in processed foods as a stabiliser and sweetener.
- Isomaltulose — a slowly-digested sugar marketed as a “lower GI” alternative; still a sugar.
Practical rule: any word ending in “-ose” on an ingredients list is a sugar.
Group 2 — The syrups
Syrups are sugars in liquid form. They blend more easily into doughs, sauces, and bars, which is why you’ll see them in almost every processed food that holds together or stays moist.
- Glucose syrup — very common in sweets, sauces, and granola bars.
- Glucose–fructose syrup — the UK name for corn-derived syrups with elevated fructose content. Functionally similar to high-fructose corn syrup.
- Corn syrup — same base product, more common in imported American foods.
- High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) — used less in the UK than the US but still appears in imports.
- Golden syrup — light treacle; a UK baking staple.
- Treacle / black treacle — dark, bitter syrup, technically a by-product of sugar refining.
- Maple syrup — reduced tree sap; 60%+ sugar by weight.
- Agave syrup / agave nectar — very high in fructose; marketed as natural but still a free sugar.
- Rice syrup / brown rice syrup — common in “natural” snack bars.
- Date syrup — concentrated date juice; increasingly fashionable, still a free sugar.
- Inverted sugar syrup — sucrose split into glucose and fructose, used to prevent crystallisation.
- Cane syrup / cane juice — processed sugar cane liquid.
- Coconut syrup — reduced coconut-palm sap.
Group 3 — The sugars-by-source
Named sugars that advertise their origin — the plant they came from — but are otherwise essentially sucrose.
- Cane sugar — sucrose from sugar cane.
- Beet sugar — sucrose from sugar beet (the main UK source).
- Coconut sugar — from coconut-palm sap; marketed as low-GI, minimal real-world difference.
- Palm sugar / palmyra sugar — from date palm or palmyra palm sap.
- Date sugar — ground dried dates.
- Demerara sugar — large-crystal partially-refined cane sugar.
- Muscovado sugar — dark, sticky unrefined cane sugar.
- Turbinado sugar — another partially-refined cane sugar.
- Molasses — the dark residual syrup from cane-sugar refining.
- Light brown / dark brown sugar — white sugar with molasses reintroduced.
- Icing sugar — finely ground sucrose, sometimes with anti-caking agents.
- Caster sugar / granulated sugar — differ only in crystal size.
The trace-mineral differences between these sugars (a little iron and potassium in molasses, for example) are nutritionally insignificant relative to the sugar content. Treat them as sucrose with a flavour profile.
Group 4 — Fruit and juice concentrates
The most marketing-friendly family. A “sweetened with fruit juice” claim on the front of a box can sound healthier than “sugar” — but when the fruit has been juiced and concentrated, what’s left is, chemically, just sugar.
- Fruit juice concentrate — any fruit juice reduced to a fraction of its water.
- Apple juice concentrate — very widely used as a “natural” sweetener in snack bars and yoghurts.
- Grape juice concentrate — similar to apple; often in jams and fruit spreads.
- Pear juice concentrate — a particularly popular sweetener in baby and toddler foods.
- Concentrated fruit puree — dried or reduced fruit used as a binding sweetener.
- Evaporated cane juice — a marketing term for partially refined cane sugar.
- Deglet noor or medjool date paste — effectively date syrup in thicker form.
- Honey — a mix of fructose and glucose plus trace enzymes; still a free sugar.
NHS guidance is explicit on this point: sugars released from the fruit cell structure (through juicing, concentrating, or puréeing) count as free sugars in exactly the same way as added table sugar. The label word “natural” doesn’t change the biology.
Group 5 — Malts and other odd ones out
- Malt extract — partially digested grain sugars, used to add sweetness and brown colour.
- Barley malt syrup — a liquid form of malt extract, common in cereals and biscuits.
- Diastatic malt — retains enzymes; used in baking.
- Caramel — cooked-down sugar, technically a sugar plus water.
- Caramel colour (E150) — a colour additive, not a sweetener, but can contribute a small amount of residual sugar.
- Maltodextrin — a polysaccharide that digests to glucose almost as fast as sugar itself; behaves like sugar in the body but is labelled as a carbohydrate on the panel.
- Polydextrose — a fibre-like polymer sometimes used as a sugar replacer; labelled as fibre, not sugar.
- Sorbitol, mannitol, xylitol, erythritol, maltitol, isomalt — sugar alcohols. Not chemically sugars, calorie-reduced, but can behave like sugar in some respects and have their own digestive effects.
Maltodextrin deserves a special note. Gram-for-gram it raises blood glucose roughly as fast as pure sugar. But on UK labels it appears in the “carbohydrates” column rather than the “of which sugars” line — because the technical definition of “sugar” under UK law is a mono- or disaccharide, and maltodextrin (a short chain of glucose units) sits just outside that definition.
What UK labelling law actually requires
Three rules are worth knowing:
- Ingredients by weight, descending. Every pre-packaged food sold in the UK must list its ingredients in decreasing order of weight at the moment of use. Sugar has to appear by name (whichever name the manufacturer has chosen) but doesn’t have to be totalled.
- Total sugars declared on the back panel. The mandatory nutrition declaration has to include a “of which sugars” figure. This combines all mono- and disaccharides in the product, regardless of what they’re called in the ingredients list. This is the single most useful number on the label.
- Claim rules. Any claim on the pack — “no added sugar”, “reduced sugar”, “low sugar”, “unsweetened” — has a legally defined meaning. Manufacturers can’t use those words loosely. The table below summarises.
| Claim on the pack | What it legally means | What it doesn’t mean |
|---|---|---|
| No added sugar | No sugar or sweetening ingredient has been added during manufacture. | The product can still contain a lot of naturally-present sugar (e.g. dried fruit, juice concentrate). |
| Unsweetened | Nothing has been added to sweeten it — including artificial sweeteners. | Says nothing about natural sugar content. |
| Reduced sugar | At least 30% less sugar than the standard version of the same food. | Doesn’t mean “low” sugar. A reduced-sugar product can still be red on the traffic light. |
| Low sugar | 5g or less of sugar per 100g (2.5g per 100ml for liquids). | Straightforwardly useful — green traffic light territory. |
| Sugar free | 0.5g or less of sugar per 100g (or 100ml). | Usually means artificial sweeteners are in use instead. |
Spotting the pattern in thirty seconds
A quick practical method that works on almost any processed food:
- Read the ingredients list. Count every word on the glossary above that appears. If two or more are in the first six ingredients, the product is sugar-heavy regardless of how it’s marketed.
- Look at the “of which sugars” line on the back panel. Compare to the front-of-pack thresholds (5g = green, 22.5g = red per 100g).
- Check the portion size. Manufacturers choose generous portion sizes for fat but stingy ones for sugar. Mentally recalculate the per-portion figure for the bowl or serving you actually eat.
If you’d like a visual sense of how much 30g of sugar is — the UK adult daily limit — see the companion piece: So, what does 30g of sugar actually look like? For everyday examples of products where all these different sugar names add up, see 10 foods with more sugar than you’d expect.
Frequently asked questions
Is honey healthier than sugar?
The NHS classifies honey as a free sugar, so it counts against the 30g daily limit in exactly the same way as granulated sugar. Honey contains trace amounts of antioxidants and enzymes, but not in quantities that meaningfully affect overall nutrition. The difference between honey and sugar is flavour, not health.
What about agave syrup?
Agave syrup is unusually high in fructose — often 70–90%, compared to around 50% in table sugar. The low glycaemic index marketed alongside agave reflects this: fructose raises blood glucose more slowly. But fructose has its own metabolic effects (particularly on the liver), and total sugar intake is what matters most. Treat agave as a free sugar, same as honey.
Is fruit juice concentrate really the same as added sugar?
From the body’s perspective, essentially yes. Once fruit has been juiced and concentrated, the sugar is no longer inside the fibre matrix of whole fruit and behaves like any other free sugar. The NHS and WHO both classify juice concentrates as free sugars.
What about sugar alcohols like xylitol and erythritol?
Sugar alcohols (polyols) aren’t chemically sugars and deliver fewer calories per gram. They’re approved as food additives in the UK. They can cause digestive discomfort at higher doses and a Europe-wide review is currently considering whether they should carry stronger warnings. They’re useful for people managing diabetes or tooth health, but shouldn’t be treated as an unlimited substitute.
Why isn’t maltodextrin on the sugar line?
Under UK and EU labelling definitions, “sugars” means mono- and disaccharides (one- or two-molecule sugars). Maltodextrin is a short chain of glucose molecules — technically a polysaccharide — so it’s declared under total carbohydrate rather than total sugars. In digestion, though, it breaks down to glucose almost immediately and raises blood glucose rapidly. It’s a sugar in everything but the label.
Sources: UK Food Information Regulations 2014 (implementing retained EU Regulation 1169/2011); Food Standards Agency labelling guidance; NHS and SACN free-sugars definitions; WHO Guideline on Sugars Intake for Adults and Children (2015); British Dietetic Association and British Nutrition Foundation technical resources. Information for consumer understanding; not a substitute for professional advice from a registered dietitian.
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