Samples of Dole's Real fruit bites (with yoghurt and whole-grain oats) arrived on my desk recently. At first glance, they look relatively healthy snacks.
The team each took a little packet - just the size for children's lunch boxes, and each containing 90 calories - and sampled them.
''Sickeningly sweet with an indiscriminate fruit taste. If you didn't know it was pineapple, you wouldn't know what flavour it was,'' said one. I agreed.
The ingredients included 22% dried fruit (pineapple, mango or apple), sugar, acidity regulator, antioxidant, and preservative, ''natural'' flavour, which can be produced by enzymes and microbiological processes, yoghurt coating, milk, titanium dioxide, emulsifiers, more ''natural'' flavours and toasted oats (16%).
And they were between 56.8% and 62% sugar so it's no wonder they were so sweet.
