Starbucks Luxury Fruit Toast

Starbucks Luxury Fruit Toast costs £3.50 and carries 491 calories with 38g of sugar. An enriched fruit loaf studded with cranberries and raisins, lifted with lemon zest, sold as two slices and served toasted.

38g of sugar is the highest figure in the breakfast category and higher than any pastry on the menu, including the pain au raisin at 19g. At 491 calories it is heavier than a butter croissant and only 28 short of the almond croissant, which is the most calorific item Starbucks sells in this category. Toast is a word that does a lot of work in disguising all of that.

Dried fruit is where nearly all of it comes from, and the arithmetic is not intuitive. A grape loses about 80 percent of its water when dried, and everything left behind concentrates, so raisins are roughly 60 percent sugar by weight. A slice generously studded with them is closer to cake than to bread, and this is two slices.

What it does carry that the pastries do not is fibre at 4.1g and protein at 12g, both the highest of anything in this category apart from the Beyond Meat sandwich. Salt is low at 0.26g, and fat is 11g with 4.5g saturated, roughly a third of what a croissant carries. On those measures it is a genuinely better breakfast than the viennoiserie next to it.

A loaf like this is not really optional to toast, and stores serve it that way for a reason. Enriched fruit bread stales quickly because the sugar and fat interfere with how the starch holds water, and heat temporarily reverses that. A slice eaten untoasted the day after baking is noticeably drier than the same slice toasted.

It carries a vegetarian label and lists egg and wheat as allergens. Butter is added at the counter and is not in the figures above. Prices reach £4.10 on delivery, which makes it one of the cheaper breakfasts.