Question 1

How does the Recipe Sugar Scanner work?

Accepted Answer

Enter each ingredient and its quantity. The tool checks every ingredient against a database of 60+ sugar aliases, flags hidden sugars that are easy to miss on labels, and shows the NOVA processing level of each ingredient.

Question 2

What is a hidden sugar?

Accepted Answer

Hidden sugars are sugar ingredients listed under names most people do not recognise, such as maltodextrin, dextrose, rice syrup, or barley malt extract. They are chemically similar to table sugar but disguised under alternative names.

Question 3

What does sugar-disguising mean?

Accepted Answer

If a recipe contains 3 or more different sugar aliases, it is flagged as sugar-disguising. This is a common food industry technique: splitting sugar across multiple ingredients so that no single sugar appears high on the ingredient list.

Question 4

Why does the scanner show NOVA scores?

Accepted Answer

Hidden sugars are strongly correlated with ultra-processed foods (NOVA 4). Showing NOVA scores alongside sugar detection helps you see whether an ingredient is both highly processed and loaded with disguised sugars.

Recipe Sugar Scanner

Ingredients

See this automatically while you shop Tesco

Frequently asked questions

Explore more tools