Starbucks Strawberry & Watermelon VITWATER 330ml

Strawberry and Watermelon VITWATER 330ml costs £2.95 at Starbucks UK and carries 73 calories with 17g of sugar. It is a flavoured water with added vitamins B12 and C, sold chilled from the fridge.

The vitamin claims are the reason it exists and they are real but modest. A bottle provides 40mg of vitamin C, half the daily reference intake, and 1.3 micrograms of B12, also half. Vitamin C supports normal energy yielding metabolism and B12 contributes to reducing tiredness, which is the approved wording and about as far as the evidence goes. Neither figure is unusual; half a day's vitamin C is roughly what a small orange delivers.

What the label is quieter about is the sugar. 17g in a 330ml bottle is more than a Grande Caffè Latte carries at 14.2g, in a drink that reads as water with vitamins in it. All 17g of the carbohydrate is sugar, and at 73 calories the bottle sits close to a small juice rather than to water.

Flavour is light, which is the point. Watermelon carries the drink and strawberry sits underneath it, and the whole thing is thinner and less sweet on the tongue than the sugar figure suggests, because there is no body to it. That thinness is what makes it easier to finish than a juice of the same sweetness.

Temperature changes how sweet it reads, which is true of every drink in the fridge but especially this one. Cold suppresses sweetness on the tongue, so a bottle drunk cold tastes lighter than the same bottle left to warm. Anyone who finds it cloying halfway down is tasting the temperature change rather than a change in the drink.

It suits vegan, vegetarian and gluten free diets. Anyone buying it as the healthy option in the fridge should compare it against ONE Water at £2.55 and no sugar at all, which is the drink this one is usually mistaken for. The Still Lemonade is the genuinely low sugar flavoured option at 0.7g.