Skip to main content

Tg green tea: Why do your drinks have added sugar?

There has been a lot of discussion, especially in the past couple of years, about the amount of sugar we’re consuming as a nation - especially from soft drinks.
That’s actually what got Sophia, my co-founder, and me wanting to develop the Iced Tg range. Our Tg green teas do contain added sugar. In total, less than 2 teaspoons of it per bottle but, before you click the “delete Tg from consideration” button, give us 2 minutes!

Just how much sugar is in my drink?

Take a bottle of your favourite soft drink and look closely at the nutritional table on the back of the pack. Look closely at the number in grams of sugar that is in the drink in your hand. The vast majority of drinks contain much more than 7g of sugar per bottle and many of them you’d never expect are loaded with 4 or more teaspoons of sugar!


Look carefully because even a drink that has a flash on front of pack “No added sugar” can pack more than 7 teaspoons!
Sugar, in small amounts, can feature in a healthy balanced diet.  However, putting 4, 5, 6, or more teaspoons of sugar into your body via a drink is not a good idea.

NHS guidelines for a healthy balanced diet says adults should consume no more than 90g of sugar from all sources each day (with no more than 30g of “added sugar”).
Our iced Tg green teas contain less than 2 teaspoons of added sugar per bottle. Sophia and I refuse to add a grain of sugar more than was necessary to ensure a tasty drink.
We even plan to reduce Tg green tea sugar levels further in our next products but, for now, we hope you like our iced teas with just a touch of added sweetness.

“No added sugar” versions of familiar drinks are not what you are expecting

We could have developed a “no added sugar” Tg green tea but we would have needed to add some weird sounding ingredients to the recipe which we were simply not prepared to do.
We also wanted to ensure we used the best sugar alternative available today, stevia, in our drink development.
We refused to work with sweeteners that appear in the list of “avoid” or “use with caution” sweeteners on the globally recognised Centre for Science in the Public Interest.
In the end, it is important to Sophia and I that we developed a great tasting iced tea that had a clean label and nutritional contents we would put our name to and be happy to drink ourselves day in, day out.

Dr Hua He MD PhD PMP
Co-founder, Tg green teas


Website:  www.drinktg.com
Twitter - @drinktg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Is Kraft Heinz dropping the Unilever acquisition just an interlude?

(c) 2012 Convergence Alimentaire blog image I cut my FMCG marketing teeth  at Unilever and ended my full-time global food & drink industry career at Kraft/Mondelez. I now run a  healthier drinks startup  business ( drinktg.com ) alongside a global innovation consultancy where I work as an  "extrapreneur"  supporting companies wanting to remake their portfolios to better fit emerging consumer needs for healthier products......so I am perhaps in a unique position to give a point of view.  If you are Dutch or British, you  feel closer culturally to Unilever  and few people living in the UK will have forgotten Kraft's poor treatment of people & assets post  Cadbury's acquisition . However, the reality is that the  vision and values of both companies are not so dissimilar  and both are facing the same  fundamental shifts  in consumer behaviour & needs in relation to "big FMCG/CPG" brands in both developed a...

Is sugar the new tobacco? Yes!....unless we do more

Ian Quinn 's article in  The Grocer , " FDF head calls out NHS boss over sugar claims " [subscription may be required] covers the Food and Drink Federation's response to a comment  NHS  head  Simon Stevens ' made in a  BBC  interview over the weekend in which he suggested  the obesity crisis  was the " new smoking ". Soft Drink and Tobacco parallels As someone who’s worked in both the  soft drink and tobacco industries , I empathise with Simon Stevens linking obesity with smoking. After sitting through thousands of interviews with smokers up and down the country talking about obstacles to quitting tobacco etc. – and observing numerous food & drink consumer research before and since then – it’s clear that there are huge parallels between triggers of the emerging obesity crisis and smoking e.g. pitched initially as “ cool ” and a “ lifestyle/generational choice ” (especially  soft drinks ) but later becoming hard to shak...

Sophia Nadur presenting at the 2017 Food Vision Asia conference

I am pleased to be presenting at the Food Vision Asia conference in Singapore 26th April 2017, on the topic of "East meets West meets East. Tapping plant wellness for new beverage segments" which will also showcase Tg green teas  - considered a leading beverage platform for translating ancient TCM wellness traditions into mass-market drinks. East meets West meets East. Tapping plant wellness for new beverage segments People instinctively know the value of consuming plant-based food and drink; they feel it’s good for their health and for the planet, its animals, climate and the environment.  In recent years, however, increased availability of highly processed products, largely marketed by Western companies, has broken the connection with indigenous plant-based diets for Asia’s millennial consumers.  At the same time, on the other side of the world the West is experiencing a fundamental consumer shift towards vegetarian, vegan and other plant-based formulations. S...