How to Cut Sugar in Drinks and Snacks: A South African Guide

To reduce sugar in a drink or snack without losing customers, list every job the sugar does in the recipe, replace each one, cut in steps your buyers cannot detect, and re-validate shelf life and the label before you scale up. South Africa’s sugar tax gives you a reason to start, and the draft labelling regulations give you a deadline to plan for.

Since 1 April 2019, every gram of sugar above 4 g per 100 ml in a levied sugary drink, made here or imported, has cost 2.21 cents in Health Promotion Levy, the sugar tax.

A 330 ml can at 10 g of sugar per 100 ml carries about 44 cents of levy. Bring the same can down to 5 g per 100 ml and the levy falls to about 7 cents. On a million cans a year, that difference is about R365,000.

The rate has not moved since 2019. Ahead of the mini budget on 21 October 2026, health groups pushed for a higher levy and SA Canegrowers asked for it to be scrapped. The Minister’s speech did not touch the levy, so 2.21c still applies. Manufacturers have not waited for the argument to end. An International Growth Centre brief published in January 2026 found that the levy cut sugar from taxed soft drinks by about a third within two years, as production shifted towards reformulated and untaxed products.

Meanwhile the draft labelling regulations, R3337, were published for comment on 21 April 2023. Comment closed in 2023, the draft was tabled at NEDLAC on 26 August 2026, and it is still not law. A public campaign is asking the Minister of Health to approve them by 10 December 2026. Whatever the timing, it makes sense to plan reformulation around the draft thresholds now.

Cutting sugar is a food science problem before it is a marketing one. This is how our food scientists approach sugar reduction with South African manufacturers, and where the projects usually go wrong. If you already have a product in mind, ask us for a reformulation quote.

What does sugar do in a drink or snack recipe?

Before choosing a replacement, list every function sugar performs in your recipe. A cordial and a muffin need very different fixes, and most failed reformulations we are asked to rescue replaced the sweetness and nothing else.

• Sweetness and flavour balance. Sugar rounds off acidity and bitterness. In a fruit drink the sugar to acid ratio decides whether it tastes fresh or sour.
• Body and mouthfeel. Dissolved sugar adds viscosity and weight in the mouth. Take it out of a drink and it can taste watery even when the sweetness is matched.
• Water activity and preservation. In jams, syrups, fillings and many sauces, sugar ties up water that microorganisms would otherwise use. Less sugar there means more available water for yeasts and moulds.
• Colour and flavour from browning. Reducing sugars such as glucose and fructose react with amino acids and proteins in the Maillard reaction, and sugars caramelise at the surface temperatures reached in baking. Sucrose browns mainly after it inverts in the dough, and polyols do not brown at all, so a biscuit or snack bar made with them comes out pale and flat tasting.
• Texture in baked goods. Sugar delays starch gelatinisation and the setting of egg and flour proteins, which keeps cakes tender and gives them time to rise before the crumb sets.
• Freezing point. In ice cream and frozen desserts, sugar lowers the freezing point and keeps the product soft enough to scoop. The effect follows the number of dissolved molecules, so dextrose and erythritol soften ice cream more than sucrose does, polydextrose and maltodextrin far less, and high intensity sweeteners not at all.
• Food for yeast and cultures. Sweet doughs and some fermented products rely on added sugar as the substrate the organisms work on. Lean bread ferments on the flour’s own sugars, so cutting added sugar there changes proof time and crust colour more than it stops fermentation.

How much sugar can you remove before customers notice?

There is no single safe percentage. It depends on the product, the flavour system and how attached your buyers are to the current taste. What works is reducing in steps and testing each step with real consumers, not with the development team, who have tasted the product so often that they no longer taste it properly.

A triangle test, the method set out in ISO 4120:2021, tells you whether people can pick the reduced version from the current one. A result that finds no difference does not prove the two are the same. To clear a step for launch, run it as a similarity test, with the risk levels and panel size fixed before you start, which needs more assessors than a difference test. Sweeteners that linger need rinsing and a rest between samples.

If people can tell the difference, a preference or acceptance test with consumers from your own market tells you whether they mind. In our experience, several smaller changes over a year cost far fewer customers than one large cut on a single launch date.

Which sweeteners and bulking agents can you use?

Sweetness is the easiest function to put back, and the most regulated. The Regulations relating to the use of sweeteners in foodstuffs (R733 of 2012), made under the Foodstuffs, Cosmetics and Disinfectants Act, 1972, allow only sweeteners listed in the Codex General Standard for Food Additives, at the maximum level set for your food category.

They bar non-nutritive sweeteners from foods for infants and young children, and they require the statement “excessive consumption may have a laxative effect” when polyols exceed 50 g per kg of the final product. Check every candidate before it goes into a trial, not after the artwork has been printed.

High intensity sweeteners such as sucralose, acesulfame K and steviol glycosides are used at tiny doses, so they replace sweetness but none of the body, browning or preservation. Each has its own taste. Steviol glycosides can leave a bitter or liquorice note at higher levels, and acesulfame K on its own can taste metallic. Blends of two or three sweeteners at lower levels usually give a cleaner taste than any one of them alone.

To put back body, drinks usually need only a little hydrocolloid such as pectin or gum acacia. In snacks and bakery, manufacturers turn to polyols such as erythritol and maltitol and to soluble fibres such as inulin and polydextrose.

Each has trade-offs. Some polyols cause digestive discomfort when eaten in quantity. Inulin breaks down to fructose in acidic products that are heated, so in a pasteurised drink it can put sugar back into the label and the test report.

Taking sugar out of a biscuit without replacing its mass raises fat and energy per 100 g, so the whole nutrition table changes. Ask for the full specification of every sweetener and flavour preparation too, because many arrive on a carrier such as maltodextrin or dextrose.

Flavour can do more work than people expect. A stronger fruit or vanilla note reduces the sugar needed for a product to taste sweet enough.

Lowering the acid in a drink does the same, but trim acid with care. Benzoate and sorbate only work in their undissociated form, and a drink preserved with benzoate that moves from pH 3.0 to pH 3.6 drops from about 94 percent of its benzoic acid in the active form to about 80 percent. Check the preservation at the top of the new pH specification, not at the target.

Will swapping sugar for sweeteners trigger a different warning?

Under draft R3337, it would. As published for comment, regulation 51 requires a front-of-pack warning on any product that contains an added artificial sweetener, in any amount, and the draft defines that term to cover intense sweeteners, steviol glycosides and polyols such as erythritol and maltitol. If that survives into the final regulations, a drink that drops its sugar warning by switching to sweeteners would pick up a sweetener warning instead, however little it uses.

The routes that avoid both warnings are a recipe with no added sugar or sweetener, or a sugar cut to 5.0 g per 100 ml (10.0 g per 100 g for solids) or less without adding any sweetener, supported by flavour, careful acid balance and soluble fibre. A smaller pack does not help, because the draft cut-offs apply per 100 ml or 100 g whatever the pack size. Our guide to front-of-pack labelling and regulatory defence compares reformulating with relabelling, and our R3337 guide sets out what else the draft proposes.

Will your shelf life change when the sugar comes out?

This is the step most often skipped, and it is the one that ends in withdrawals. In a jam, filling, syrup, cordial concentrate or sauce, sugar is part of the preservation. A traditional 65 Brix jam sits at a water activity of around 0.80 to 0.85. Bring it down to 40 to 50 Brix and water activity climbs to around 0.90 to 0.95, where many yeasts and moulds grow.

A ready-to-drink beverage is different. At 10 g of sugar per 100 ml its water activity is already about 0.99, so taking sugar out barely changes it. What keeps a drink stable is pH, the preservative, heat treatment and hygiene, and reformulation moves those.

The yeast to plan for is Zygosaccharomyces bailii. It is osmotolerant, so it spoils full sugar syrups as readily as reduced sugar drinks, it can grow at preservative levels above the legal limits, and it ferments product on the shelf, swelling packs and in the worst cases bursting bottles.

Treat every reduced sugar recipe as a new product for shelf life. Measure pH and water activity on the new formulation, check that the preservation system still holds at the edge of its specification, and run a shelf life study on the reformulated product in its final pack, with a taste panel at the end of shelf life because some sweeteners and flavours fade in storage.

If the new recipe pairs sodium benzoate with ascorbic acid, test for benzene, because sugar slows its formation and diet drinks carry the greatest potential. Our short course on conducting a shelf life study walks a team through the design.

Your HACCP or food safety team must approve the change before new ingredients come on site, and review the hazard analysis for the new recipe, because new ingredients bring new suppliers, possibly new allergens and sometimes new process steps. If a reduced sugar line has already swollen or grown mould, send us the product detail and your shelf life data and our food scientists will tell you what evidence would settle it.

What changes on the label and with the SARS sugar tax?

The nutritional information table must reflect the new recipe, and every sugar claim must fit R146 exactly. A “reduced sugar” claim needs at least 25 percent less sugar than the named original, with the percentage and the original stated next to the claim and nutrition information for both (regulation 53). “Sugar free” means no more than 0.5 g per 100 g or 100 ml. The claim “no added sugar” may not be used if any sugar is added (regulation 52(13)). R146 sets no condition for “low sugar”, so that claim is not available.

If the recipe now uses sweeteners, R733 adds its own label wording: the words “non-nutritive sweetener” in brackets after the name of a non-nutritive sweetener in the ingredient list, “excessive consumption may have a laxative effect” where polyols exceed 50 g per kg, and the required statements for aspartame.

Claims are among the most common findings when we review labels, usually because the claim was written for an earlier recipe and nobody checked it again. Our guide to health and nutrition claims explains the rules, and a label review checks the new artwork before it goes to the printer.

The sugar tax is self-assessed. For drinks within the levy, you pay on the sugar content certified on a test report from a laboratory accredited by SANAS or through ILAC, using a recognised method, and you must keep that report on file. Without a valid report the sugar content is taken as 20 g per 100 ml, which is more than most soft drinks contain.

For cordials and powders, the levy is worked out on the drink as made up to the dilution in your product specification, so fix the dilution before you test. After a reformulation, have the new recipe tested by an accredited laboratory so that the lower sugar content is the figure you pay on. Our guide to working with food testing laboratories covers what to ask the lab.

How to reduce sugar in a South African factory, step by step

1. Set the baseline. Sugar content by recipe and by accredited laboratory, Brix, pH, water activity, a sensory profile and the current shelf life.
2. Set the target, with margin. For example 4 g per 100 ml or less so that no levy is payable, or below the draft R3337 cut-off of more than 5.0 g of total sugar per 100 ml, leaving room for batch variation and laboratory uncertainty.
3. Approve before anything comes on site. Approve the supplier and specification of every new ingredient, complete the allergen risk assessment, and have the HACCP team leader sign off the change before trial materials enter the factory.
4. Run bench trials in steps. Change one thing at a time while you step the sugar down, and use a small designed experiment where sweeteners, acid and flavour interact. Give every trial recipe its own version number and date.
5. Test with consumers at each step. Similarity tests to clear a step, preference or acceptance tests where people can tell the difference.
6. Re-run the hazard analysis. Review the HACCP plan for the new recipe as well as any process change, because a higher water activity or pH can change which hazards are significant and whether the heat treatment or preservative is still validated. Update the food fraud vulnerability assessment for each new raw material.
7. Run a factory trial. Dose high intensity sweeteners as a pre-dissolved premix, and reset in-process checks because Brix no longer tracks sweetness once sugar is replaced.
8. Validate shelf life on production product. Screen with bench samples, then run the study on product from the factory trial in the final pack, under storage conditions that match distribution, with set microbiological, chemical and sensory end points. Add a challenge study with a preservative adapted Zygosaccharomyces bailii strain at the upper pH limit where pH has moved.
9. Review the label and prove the claims. Nutrition table, claims, any polyol statement and the artwork against R146 and R733. Keep validation evidence for every claim, such as an accredited laboratory result on production product. Withdraw the old artwork at the printer, quarantine old printed packaging on site, and check the first production run against the approved label.
10. Test for SARS before launch. Send drinks from production to an accredited laboratory so the lower sugar content is the figure you pay on.

At ASC Food Safety Consultants, our food scientists and technologists run this process with manufacturers, from the first bench trial to the signed off label, and train in-house teams to run it themselves. Food Science and Technology Support covers reformulation, shelf life, sensory work and process validation.

Questions we are often asked

Is R3337 law yet?

No. R3337 was published for comment on 21 April 2023 and, as at 28 October 2026, has not been finalised. R146 remains the labelling regulation you must comply with today. Plan for R3337, but do not label as if it were in force.

How much sugar tax does a 330 ml can pay?

The levy is 2.21 cents for every gram of sugar above 4 g per 100 ml. A 330 ml can at 10 g per 100 ml has 19.8 g of sugar above the threshold, so about 44 cents of levy. At 5 g per 100 ml it is about 7 cents, and at 4 g per 100 ml or less there is no levy.

Would stevia or erythritol avoid an R3337 warning?

Not as the regulations are drafted. The draft defines artificial sweeteners to include steviol glycosides and polyols such as erythritol, and requires a warning on any product that contains one, in any amount.

Can ASC reformulate our product?

Yes. ASC’s food science and technology team works with manufacturers on sugar reduction, shelf life, sensory testing and the label that goes with the new recipe. Ask for a quote or WhatsApp us on +27 61 483 0381.