Starbucks Smooth Orange Juice 250ml

Smooth Orange Juice 250ml costs £2.80 at Starbucks UK and carries 91 calories with 20g of sugar. It is 100 percent pure squeezed fruit with the bits taken out, sold chilled in a 250ml bottle.

Smooth means the pulp has been filtered rather than the juice diluted, so nothing about the strength changes. What does change is how it feels, and for a lot of people that is the whole decision: pulp in orange juice is one of those things people either want or actively avoid. The filtering costs a small amount of the fibre, which is the only nutritional difference worth mentioning.

At 250ml it is the smallest juice in the fridge and the most sensible of them on sugar. 20g in this bottle against 28g in the 500ml apple and mango is mostly a size difference rather than a recipe one, but the size is the part that reaches you. Anyone who wants juice with breakfast rather than a sugar load is better served here.

Pure squeezed also means the flavour moves with the season and the batch, more than a concentrate based drink would. A bottle in one month can be noticeably sharper than the next, which is a feature of the product rather than a fault, and it is the reason this tastes more like orange than most bottled juice does.

Orange juice and coffee together is a combination worth a warning. The acidity in citrus strips the coating off your tongue, so a coffee drunk straight after tastes noticeably more bitter than it otherwise would. A few minutes between the two, or the juice taken afterwards, avoids it entirely.

Vegan, vegetarian and gluten free labels all apply. The Berries Juice Drink is the smallest bottle at 63 calories, and ONE Water at £2.55 is the option with no sugar in it at all.