this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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Well, it was supposed to be mainly a hazelnut cream with some sugar, cocoa and maybe a few other minor ingredients. And in fact, when it was new and conquering markets, that was what it was.
I think the decades starting with the early 1990s had desensitized a lot of us to enormous amounts of sugar, and in the end we didn't even consciously notice anymore how sweet that stuff had gotten.
Many years ago I developed a weird food intolerance called Fructose Malabsorption. Basically, free fructose molecules mess me up, but sucrose (table sugar) doesn't, so among other things I started avoiding things with much HFCS in them. I started getting unsweetened iced tea at restaurants and adding sugar. I was absolutely disgusted by how much sugar you have to add to make it as sweet as a soda or sweet tea. In a regular sized drink cup (american medium), I add three packets, and that is very slightly sweet. To make it as sweet as "normal" I'd easily have to add three times that.
I'm actually a bit surprised it has so much sugar in it and they haven't tried to replace it with some sort of artificial sweetener or HFCS. The sugar has to be the lion share of the cost, maybe tied with the Coco.
The sugar also supplies a significant amount of the volume of the product. Artificial sweetener is significantly sweeter than sucrose, like hundreds of times sweeter, so just swapping the sugar for artificial sweetener would require them to use a bulking agent. The safest bulking agent that doesn't change the flavor or texture would be sugar.