How to read food labels on a fermented drink

The interesting part of a bottle is the part nobody photographs. Turn any fermented drink around and you get perhaps forty words of small print: a list of ingredients, a nutrition table, a date, a line about storage. Those forty words are regulated. The front of the bottle, largely, is not.

What follows is a way to read that small print — on our bottles and on anyone else's. None of it asks you to trust the maker, which is rather the point.

Ingredients are listed heaviest first

The list runs in descending order by weight, measured at the time the product was made. The first two or three ingredients are most of what you are drinking. Everything past the halfway mark is usually present in small amounts, however impressive it sounds.

For a fermented drink the first ingredient is nearly always water — on ours, ionised alkaline water at pH 9.2 — followed by whatever fruit or vegetable went in. If a sugar or a syrup appears in the first three, that tells you something real about how the drink is balanced. It is not a verdict, just information.

There is a second rule worth knowing. If the front of the pack makes a fuss about a particular ingredient — names it, pictures it, puts it in the product name — the label has to tell you how much of it there is, as a percentage. If a drink is sold on its cherries and no percentage appears anywhere, the cherries are probably doing less work than the front suggests.

Added sugars and naturally occurring sugars look identical in the nutrition table

The EU nutrition table gives you "carbohydrate, of which sugars". That is one number, and it is a total. It does not separate the sugar that arrived inside the fruit from the honey or syrup someone poured in afterwards. Unlike labels in some other markets, there is no required "added sugars" line to check.

So the ingredient list is the only place to look. Honey, syrups, concentrated juices and cane sugar are all sugars, wherever they sit in the sentence. Fermentation itself consumes part of the sugar that is present, and how much depends on the batch and the length of the cycle, which is why the sugars figure declared on a living product is an average value that any given bottle will sit a little either side of.

Pasteurised or live: the label usually gives it away

A drink that has been heat-treated after fermentation becomes shelf-stable. One that has not, does not. You can generally work out which you are holding by reading three things together: whether the words "pasteurised" or "heat-treated" appear at all, where the bottle was sitting in the shop, and what the storage line says.

"Keep refrigerated" alongside a short date is a strong signal. "Store in a cool, dry place" alongside a twelve-month date is a different kind of product — not a worse one, but a different one, and worth knowing before you compare the two on price. If you would rather not infer any of this, a maker ought to be spelling it out; ours does on the production page, including the pressure, the temperature ceiling and the batch testing.

"Cultured" does not mean the same thing as "contains live cultures"

"Cultured" and "fermented" are process words in the past tense. They describe something that happened to the liquid. They remain true whether or not anything is still alive by the time the bottle reaches you. "Contains live cultures" is a different sort of statement altogether — it is about the contents now, in your hand.

The two get used interchangeably on front labels, and they should not be. The word "probiotic" is a third thing again: in several member states it is treated as a health claim rather than a plain description, so it appears far less often on labels sold in Germany, France or Belgium than it does in marketing copy elsewhere. Its absence from a label tells you nothing about what is in the bottle. Its presence tells you less than people assume. We do not use the word at all: we write live cultures, which describes what is in the liquid rather than claiming anything for it.

How alcohol is declared on a fermented drink

Fermentation produces small quantities of alcohol. It is a by-product of the process rather than something anyone added, and it appears in most live ferments to some degree. In EU labelling the line sits at 1.2% by volume. Above that figure, a drink must declare its actual alcoholic strength on the label. At or below it, there is no requirement to print a number at all.

Which means an absent alcohol figure tells you the drink is at or below 1.2%. It does not tell you the figure is zero. This is ordinary. If a maker addresses it nowhere — not on the label, not on the site, not in an FAQ — that is a reasonable thing to ask about. We can answer it here: fermentation leaves a minimal quantity of naturally occurring alcohol in our drinks, at or below that threshold, which is why they are classed as non-alcoholic.

The storage line is a description of the product, not an afterthought

The storage instruction is often the most honest sentence on a label, because it is operational. It has to be true, or the product fails before its date and the maker hears about it.

Read it as a description of what is in the bottle. Something that must stay cold is something that changes when it does not. Something that tolerates a warm shelf for a year has usually been stabilised in some way, and the label will normally say how. Our own drinks travel cold in insulated packaging with tracked carriers and want a fridge as soon as they arrive, which shapes the whole of how we handle delivery — that is a constraint we inherited from the process, not a service feature we chose.

Best-before and use-by are not the same date

Best-before is about quality. After it, a food may be past its best, but it is not unsafe by that fact alone. Use-by is about safety, and it is applied to products where microbiological risk climbs with time; after that date the food should not be eaten and should not be sold.

Which of the two a maker prints tells you which risk they have judged to be the governing one. For a chilled, living product, a short date is not a defect or a sign of corner-cutting. It is the arithmetic consequence of not having killed anything.

What a food is actually allowed to claim in the EU

This is where label-reading most often goes wrong, because people assume that a printed claim must have been checked by somebody. Some have been. Many have not.

In plain terms, the position is this. Nutrition claims are permitted only where they appear in the Annex to the EU claims Regulation, and health claims only where they are authorised and entered on the EU register — each with conditions attached about what the food must contain, and only wording that means the same thing to a consumer may be used. Separately, claims that a food prevents, treats or cures a disease are not permitted on any food at all — not for any product, not in any wording, not hedged, not implied, and not smuggled in through a quotation from a happy customer.

So the useful question to hold in your head while reading is simple: is this sentence describing the food, or is it promising something about my body? Ingredients, process, origin, taste, texture, storage and provenance are open ground, and a good maker will fill that ground with specifics. Promises about outcomes are not open ground. A food making them is telling you that it is either unaware of the rules or has decided they do not apply to it, and either way you have learned something you can use.

The one-minute version

• Read the first three ingredients. That is most of what you are drinking.
• If the front of the pack names an ingredient, look for its percentage. No percentage, less ingredient.
• Treat "of which sugars" as a total, then use the ingredient list to find where it came from.
• Read the storage line and the length of the date together. They describe the same thing.
• Check whether "pasteurised" or "heat-treated" appears anywhere on the label.
• Separate the process word ("cultured", "fermented") from the compositional one ("contains live cultures").
• No alcohol figure means at or below 1.2% by volume. It does not mean zero.
• Best-before is quality. Use-by is safety.

All of which explains why our own labels and product pages say so comparatively little. They list what is in the bottle, how it was made, how to keep it and how much of it there is. That can read as restraint, or as a house style. Mostly it is just the rules, followed reasonably closely.

Apply the same reading to us that you would to anything else on the shelf. Start with the first three ingredients, check the date against the storage line, and count how many sentences on the label are describing the food rather than promising you something. If ours do not survive that, we have written them badly and would rather know.