Starbucks Berries Juice Drink 200ml

Berries Juice Drink 200ml costs £2.95 at Starbucks UK and carries 63 calories with 15g of sugar. It is a pasteurised juice drink made with apple and blackcurrant juices and strawberry and raspberry purees.

Juice drink rather than juice is the phrase that matters here, and it is a legal distinction rather than marketing. A juice drink contains juice plus other things, usually water, so this is not the same category as the pure squeezed orange. What it does contain that the others do not is puree, which keeps the fruit solids in and gives the drink noticeably more body.

The 200ml bottle is the smallest in the fridge, and that size is what makes it the usual choice for a child alongside a sandwich. At 63 calories and 15g of sugar it is lighter in absolute terms than any other juice on the shelf, though not per 100ml, where it sits in the middle of the range.

Blackcurrant is the flavour that dominates, with the raspberry giving it sharpness and the apple sitting underneath as the sweetener. That combination is much closer to a British squash than to a continental fruit juice, which is either familiar or cloying depending on what you grew up drinking.

Pasteurised is the other word on the label and it explains the shelf life. The drink is heated briefly to kill off anything living in it, which is what lets a juice drink sit in a fridge for weeks rather than days. It costs a little of the fresh character, which is the trade every long life juice makes.

It carries a trace of salt at 0.01g, which is negligible. No dietary labels are attached to this one, so anyone eating vegan should check the current label in store rather than assuming. The Smooth Orange Juice is the pure squeezed option at £2.80, and the Apple and Mango Juice is the large bottle at 112 calories.