While everyone else went off to a) play video games (do they even call them that these days?!?), or b) watch some on-demand show that I am not up to date on, I carried the dinner conversation on by myself.
The Sauce!
We were comparing the sugar content of various sauces with our steak / chicken salad / corn fritter dinner. Which was delicious and the sauces really make a difference.
In short, as we pulled the products for out of the fridge for a look we were shocked.
We used to go for the hot and spicy Maggi sauce that a neighbor gave us, as we all loved it. But more recently at the Matakana Market we found Jimmy's Craft Foods and had two of them on the table with dinner. We also had two of Fiona's Fabulous Food chutneys from Oratia Farmers Market, but alas - amazing as they were - there was no sugar content reading.
So. The conversation was around why we loved these old sauces so much... and you guessed it: sugar content.
Sugar. Sugar. Sugar.
We pulled out some ageing sauce bottles from the fridge and compared what we have and these are the ugly results:
| Brand | Product | Sugar per 100g | Teaspoon Equivalent |
| Maggi | Hot 'n Sweet Tomato Chilli Sauce | 37.4 | 9 |
| Greggs | Smokey BBQ | 32.3 | 8 |
| Watties | Tomato Sauce | 29.4 | 7 |
| Jimmys | Summer Series Smoked Sweet Chilli Sauce | 14.4 | 3 |
| Jimmys | Kiwi Bushmans Wild Game BBQ Sauce | 11.1 | 3 |
FUN FACT: The supermarket sauces recommend really small "serving sizes" like 9 grams (Maggi), or 15 grams (Watties), which I am sure few people adhere to. By giving this serving size, they can argue that they are by far and away the healthy choice when compared to Jimmy, who is realistic/honest about a 25 gram serving size.
Price is an obvious a barrier to entry, but we can't state strongly enough how great the low(er) sugar sauces from Jimmys are. Not only do they have 1/2 to a 1/3 the sugar content of standard supermarket options, but they are far more complex and tasty.
I'm a bit of a geek, so I made a graph:
3 is not great either, but imagine pouring 4-5 teaspoons of sugar on your meal!! For reference, the recommended daily dose of sugar is just 3-4 teaspoons, yet more than that would come from a reasonable helping of Class-A Maggi or Greggs on your din-din!
It is no wonder that we have a Type-2 Diabetes epidemic (that we don't hear about).
