If You’re Keeping An Eye On Sugars, Watch Out For This Trader Joe’s Item

It’s easy to think that Trader Joe’s is health-focused – and while it’s definitely not NOT health-focused, it’s also fair to argue that it isn’t its top priority. With its mission to leave out any artificial flavors and preservatives, hydrogenated oils, and other questionable ingredients from its products, it definitely tries hard to create foods that remain natural and somewhat wholesome – and its wealth of organic items reinforces this. That, plus its general image, can make it hard to spot when some of its products contain levels of fat, salt, or sugar that you might want to avoid. 

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We were reminded of this again recently, when a customer pointed out the surprisingly high sugar levels in one of its smoothie beverages – and it opened up a discussion about the sweetness of its other products.

Sweet Treats

Yesterday, a Redditor posted a thread highlighting the high sugar levels of one specific item at Trader Joe’s – and while the picture has since been removed, luckily, we caught a glimpse of it before it disappeared. That item in question is its Chocolate Almond Protein Smoothie Beverage, a drink that gives all the signals of being pretty nutrition-focused. High in protein? Made with oat beverage, and therefore friendly for people on dairy-free diets? Five grams of fiber? Tick, tick, tick. 

Then you get to the amount of sugar in the drink, and see that it’s got…18 grams, 17 of which are added. Yikes. That’s over a third of your recommended daily allowance for added sugar, in one bottle. While one person in the Reddit thread questioned why people would think this is a healthy drink in the first place (fair point), others said that the sugar content was just annoying. It could have been so nutritious – but all that sweetness let it down. 

Too Sweet To Handle

As mentioned, some others in the Reddit thread started piping up about which other products were too sugary for them, and the store’s Spicy Mango Lemonade got a not-so-respectable shoutout. This drink, incidentally, has 27 grams of added sugar per eight-ounce glass, which puts it roughly on a par with the sugar content of Coca-Cola. Again, it might not be a big surprise that this drink is sugary – but when people are saying that they treat it like a concentrate instead and water it down (as one Redditor did), you know that it’s setting people’s teeth on edge.