Name: Ribena.
Appearance: Purple.
Origin: A wartime vitamin C supplement for children, named after the blackcurrant plant Ribes nigrum.
Taste: Here, try some.
Mmm, thanks. I love Ri … Yeurgh! What’s that? Ribena.
But Ribena combines the natural sharpness of blackcurrants with the natural sweetness of a lorryful of sugar. This stuff’s just weird. Well, it has been quietly reformulated recently. Some people did notice a new flavour profile.
It tastes like a robot’s armpit. Yes, not everyone likes it at first. Suntory, the Japanese megacorporation that owns Ribena, has replaced a lot of the sugar with the sweeteners acesulfame K and sucralose. And it has added polydextrose, a soluble fibre, to keep it gloopy.
Why would they do a crazy thing like that? It’s called the soft drinks industry levy, and it comes into force on 6 April. It makes drinks companies pay a tax for adding sugar.
Hey! I like sugar. I know, I know. We all like sugar. That’s the problem. We consume too much of it, particularly in drinks, which don’t have to be sugary at all.
But sugary drinks are nice! And obesity isn’t. So you take your choice. The British Medical Association thinks the levy is the way to go.
Oh, them. They’re always like, “Let’s cure you of this … avoid dying of that … Ribena is worse than anthrax.” I’m not sure they would go that far. Drinks companies had to decide whether to pay the tax – which means less profit or higher prices – or to reformulate, which is what Ribena did, along with Lucozade, Irn-Bru, Robinsons Fruit Shoot and others.
Yeah, but acesulfame K? Sucralose? Those sound like chemicals. Don’t chemicals give you cancer? Those don’t, according to all the evidence. But being obese increases your risk. And it gives you a lot of other nasty things as well.
How about polydextrose? The internet says it can cause bloating, farting and soggy poos. Well, it’s fibre, so … yeah, maybe. But I doubt there’s enough in a glass of Ribena.
I think you’re missing the point. Ribena used to be yummy. It also used to be 29% sugar. Now it’s 13%.
Still, they could have warned us. How?
With a big advertising campaign saying they were about to make their product taste worse. Ribena must have decided against that. I didn’t notice any other companies doing it either.
In that case, I’m going to boycott all sweet drinks. I’ll just drink tap water when I’m thirsty. That’s kind of the idea …
Do say: “It’s all been downhill since they took the cocaine out of Coca-Cola.”
Don’t say: “We’ll always have coffee.”
