Why Is There Sugar in My Savoury Snack? A Singapore Label-Reading Guide

You turn over a packet of salt-and-pepper crackers, expecting salt, flour and oil. Instead, three ingredients down, there it is: sugar. Not in a biscuit. In something that does not taste sweet at all.

This is one of the most common questions Singaporean shoppers ask about packaged snacks, and the honest answer has two halves. The first is that sugar is doing real work in that recipe. The second is more awkward: on most Singapore snack packets, you will not be able to find out how much sugar is in there, because the label is not always required to say.

Sugar in a savoury snack is not usually there for sweetness

At the small percentages used in savoury seasonings, sugar is not meant to register as sweet. It is doing structural and sensory jobs.

The most visible one is colour. When sugars and proteins meet heat, they brown — the Maillard reaction. That is what gives a baked cracker its toasted, golden look and a good part of its roasted aroma. Take the sugar out and the same cracker bakes out pale and flat-smelling.

Sugar also rounds off sharp edges in a seasoning. Salt, vinegar powder, yeast extract, chilli and potassium-based salt replacers all carry bitter or harsh notes, and a small amount of sugar softens them so the blend tastes balanced rather than aggressive.

And it changes texture. A 2026 review in npj Science of Food on sugar reduction notes that sugar contributes bulk and structure to the food matrix, not just sweetness — which is exactly why reformulating sugar out of a product without wrecking how it eats is genuinely difficult, rather than a case of manufacturers being lazy. Singapore's own HealthHub makes the same point plainly: sugar is often added during processing to enhance flavours or act as a preservative.

The awkward part: the label often does not have to tell you

Here is the bit most shoppers do not realise. In Singapore, a Nutrition Information Panel (NIP) is not mandatory on most pre-packaged foods. According to the Health Promotion Board, an NIP is required only for products that carry a health or nutrition claim, edible fats and oils, Nutri-Grade beverages, and special purpose foods.

And when an NIP is required, the mandatory nutrients are energy, protein, fat and carbohydrate — plus whatever nutrient is the subject of the claim. Sugars only has to appear when sugar itself is being claimed about, as in "no added sugar" or "low in sugar".

So a packet of savoury crackers can legitimately list sugar in the ingredients and show you no sugar figure anywhere. The carbohydrate line does not help either: total carbohydrate lumps starch and sugars together, and in a cracker the starch dwarfs everything else. (Nutri-Grade, worth saying clearly, applies to beverages — it is not a snack label.)

In practice many manufacturers do declare sugars voluntarily, and imported products often carry their home market's fuller panel. But you cannot assume it.

How to read it when there is no number

Fall back on the ingredients list, which is mandatory and is ordered by weight, heaviest first.

  • Look for the aliases. Sugar travels under many names: glucose syrup, dextrose, maltose, invert sugar, molasses, honey, fructose, corn syrup solids, malt extract. Several of these can appear in one product.
  • Check the position. Sugar sitting after the seasoning and spices, near the end of a long list, is a flavour-balancing dose — likely well under a gram per serving. Sugar in the top three of a short list is a different story.
  • Watch for stacking. If three separate sweeteners each appear low in the list, their combined weight may exceed an ingredient ranked above them.
  • Treat a sugar figure as total sugars. Where a number is given, it generally covers naturally occurring sugars as well as added ones — grains and dried seasonings contribute some on their own.

How much does this actually matter?

Less than the internet suggests, if we are talking about a pinch of sugar in a seasoning blend.

The World Health Organization recommends keeping free sugars below 10% of total energy intake, with a further reduction below 5% (roughly 25g, or six teaspoons a day) offering additional benefit. HealthHub puts the 10% figure at about 10 teaspoons, or 50g, for a typical 2,000 kcal adult day. The Ministry of Health has confirmed in Parliament that HPB's policy position is consistent with the under-10% recommendation, and that the 5% level is a conditional one.

Against a 50g daily budget, half a gram of sugar in a seasoning is noise. WHO's own concern is with the bigger hidden sources — it points out that a single can of sugar-sweetened soft drink can carry around 40g of free sugars, and even a tablespoon of ketchup about 4g.

So the useful takeaway is not "avoid any snack that lists sugar". It is: know the difference between a trace and a load, and be suspicious when a savoury product lists three sweeteners high up, or shows no sugar figure while marketing itself on health.

The honest counter-argument

Two things cut the other way, and they are worth saying.

First, small amounts add up across a day of snacking, sauces and drinks — which is precisely WHO's point about hidden sugars. Nobody eats one ingredient list.

Second, for most savoury snacks the sugar is rarely the thing worth worrying about. Sodium and saturated fat in a packet of crisps will usually dominate the nutritional picture long before the half-gram of dextrose in the seasoning does. Fixating on the sugar line can distract from the number that actually matters.

Where HexaCrunch sits

We think a savoury snack should be able to survive being read closely. HexaCrunch crackers are baked from brown rice and cricket protein, and the ingredients list is short enough that you can check it in one glance rather than decoding it. If you would like to compare all three flavours side by side, the Try-All 3-Pack is the easiest place to start.

And if you only take one habit away from this: turn the packet over and read the ingredients list, not just the front of the pack. In Singapore, that list is often the only sugar information you are guaranteed to get.

Sources

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