Walk into any supermarket in Switzerland and pick up a bag of dried mango, cranberries, or pineapple. Flip it over. Nine times out of ten you'll find sugar listed as the second ingredient — sometimes the first. It's so common that most people assume it's just how dried fruit works. It isn't.
Fruit already contains sugar. That's not a problem — it's fructose, it comes packaged with fiber, water, and micronutrients that slow absorption and give your body context for processing it. When you dry fruit, you concentrate what's already there. A handful of dried apricots is sweeter than fresh ones not because anything was added, but because the water was removed. The sugar-to-weight ratio increases. That's it.
So why do manufacturers add sugar?
A few reasons, none of them good for you. First, cost — adding cheap sugar or glucose syrup is an easy way to bulk up the product and hit a price point. Second, shelf life and texture — sugar acts as a preservative and keeps fruit from clumping or drying out further. Third, and most cynically, taste engineering — processed sugar hits the palate differently than natural fructose, creating a sharper sweetness that people associate with quality without realising it's artificial.
The result is a product that bears the health halo of fruit but delivers a blood sugar spike closer to candy. Cranberries are probably the worst offender — naturally tart, they're almost universally sold with added sugar because manufacturers assume nobody will buy the unsweetened version. Which is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because nobody ever offers it.
What to look for
The ingredient list should have one item: the fruit. Sometimes with a preservative like sulphur dioxide for colour retention, which is generally harmless in the quantities used. That's it. If you see sugar, glucose syrup, apple juice concentrate, or anything else — put it back.
- One ingredient — the fruit itself
- No added sweeteners in any form including "natural" ones like apple juice concentrate
- Check the sugar content — high is fine if it's naturally occurring, but cross-reference with what you'd expect for that fruit
- Texture tells you something — overly soft or sticky dried fruit often has added sugar or oil coating
Why we built dryfood.ch around this
This was the original frustration. I wanted good dried fruit as a training snack — portable, calorie-dense, real food. Everything in Swiss supermarkets either had added sugar, came in tiny overpriced portions, or both. So we sourced it ourselves, dried it properly, and kept the ingredient list honest.
It sounds like a small thing. But food quality compounds over time the same way everything else does. What you eat every day matters more than what you eat occasionally. Dried fruit without added sugar is just better food — for energy, for digestion, for actually knowing what you're putting in your body.