Added sugar is the most-renamed ingredient in the US food supply. A single product can carry three or four different sugars — each low enough on the list to look innocent, but together dominating the formulation. Here are all 56 names we track, why they exist, and how our scorer catches the stack.
US law (21 CFR 101.4) requires ingredients to be listed in descending order by weight. If a manufacturer used 30 grams of cane sugar in a product, "Sugar" would be the first or second ingredient — a visible problem on the front of the label. If the same manufacturer splits that 30 grams across three sweeteners — 12 grams cane sugar, 10 grams maltodextrin, 8 grams fruit juice concentrate — each falls lower on the list, and "Whole Wheat Flour" ends up first. The total sugar is identical. The label reads as a healthier product.
This practice has a name in food-industry circles: ingredient splitting. Our scoring engine has a name for detecting it: sugar stacking.
Sugar · cane sugar · beet sugar · organic cane sugar · evaporated cane juice · cane crystals · turbinado sugar · demerara sugar · muscovado sugar · raw sugar · brown sugar · confectioner's sugar · powdered sugar · invert sugar · panela · piloncillo.
Glucose · dextrose · glucose solids · glucose syrup · dextrose monohydrate · corn sugar · crystalline fructose.
Fructose · high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) · HFCS-42 · HFCS-55 · fruit fructose · crystalline fructose.
Corn syrup · corn syrup solids · maltodextrin · dextrin · maltose · malt syrup · barley malt · barley malt extract · rice syrup · brown rice syrup · tapioca syrup · tapioca maltodextrin.
Fruit juice concentrate · apple juice concentrate · pear juice concentrate · grape juice concentrate · date syrup · date paste · date sugar · raisin juice concentrate · fig paste.
Honey · maple syrup · agave nectar · agave syrup · sorghum syrup · molasses · blackstrap molasses · coconut sugar · coconut nectar · palm sugar · yacon syrup.
Lactose · galactose · whey sugar.
Physiologically, sucrose is about 50% glucose and 50% fructose. HFCS-55 is 55% fructose and 45% glucose. Honey is roughly 38% fructose, 31% glucose. Maple syrup is mostly sucrose. Agave nectar is 70 to 90% fructose — the highest-fructose common sweetener on the shelf. The health effects scale with total dose and with fructose fraction, not with whether the label says "organic cane sugar" or "brown rice syrup." Every one of the 56 names contributes to the same total added-sugar tally in USDA FoodData Central.
The 2020–2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend keeping added sugar under 10% of total calories — roughly 50 grams per day on a 2,000-calorie diet. The American Heart Association is stricter: 25 grams for women, 36 for men. Most adults in the NHANES data are well over both thresholds, and most of the excess comes from products that split sugar across multiple names on the label.
Our ingredient parser tokenises every label against the 56-name list above plus common misspellings and foreign-language equivalents. Any product with three or more distinct sugar sources in a single ingredient list triggers the sugar-stacking flag. The flag applies a score penalty proportional to the number of stacked sources:
Three sources: a 5-point penalty. Four sources: 10 points. Five or more: a 15-point penalty plus an automatic amber or red badge regardless of the remainder of the label.
The penalty sits on top of the standard added-sugar grams-per-serving deduction, because the stacking pattern itself is evidence of a deliberate formulation decision rather than a recipe artefact. A product that meets its sweetness target with one well-labelled sweetener is a different product from one that hides the same sweetness across four.
Consider a granola bar with this ingredient list: rolled oats, brown rice syrup, honey, cane sugar, almonds, chocolate chips (sugar, cocoa mass, cocoa butter), natural flavour. Individually, brown rice syrup, honey, and cane sugar each sit below the almonds. The chocolate chip sugar is inside a sub-ingredient. The front of the package says "sweetened with honey." The actual added-sugar content, summed across the five sources, is 14 grams per bar — about 3.5 teaspoons. Our scorer flags this as a four-source stack, applies the 10-point penalty, and surfaces a cleaner alternative bar in the same category.
Count the sugar names on the label. Zero to one is a good sign. Two is acceptable in a product where sweetness is the point (a jam, a cookie). Three or more in a product marketed as healthy — a granola, a yogurt, a bread, a sauce, a protein bar — is the tell that the formulation is doing marketing work the ingredient list is designed to hide.
The app does the counting automatically. Scan any product with What's the Score? and the sugar-stacking flag, total added sugar in grams, and a lower-sugar alternative will appear in under a second.