Can you spot the raw sugar sachet from the fist full of sugars
on offer at your local café?
Take a look at this picture and tell me honestly… which one do you think is the RAW sugar?
There’s nothing more annoying than sitting down at your local café for a nice cuppa coffee and a read of the Sunday paper, than having it all destroyed by putting WHITE sugar in your coffee!
You’re in a relaxed mood and reach for the sugar and grab what you rightly would think is the RAW sugar sachet, tear it open and casually pour it in… you don’t take time out to read the label, you don’t pour it slowly to check the contents, you don’t think, you just do it automatically.
All your actions are instinctively based on the colour coding of the sugar sachets.
Invariably it all goes wrong.
But how so? Each sugar sachet is colour coded by brand and contents, with greater emphasis on the former. Beyond that, some sachets might be labelled ‘raw’, ‘brown’, ‘fine’ or ‘white’ but not all. In the end, you have to rely on mentally matching the sachet colour to its contents like this.
Blue/white – this colour combo is reserved for sweetners and is easily told apart from the others because it is generally smaller or considerably lighter.
Red – this colour tends to always be the white sugar or fine sugar (refined white but still white in colour).
Black – this is where things start to get blurred. Black sugar sachets tend to be the preserve of Italian coffee manufacturers and could be either raw or white sugar but generally are labelled accordingly.
Brown – this colour is the bane of my coffee existence. Raw sugar is brown so one would expect raw sugar to be in brown sugar sachets… right?… but you’d be WRONG. For some inexplicable reason, sugar manufacturers feel it necessary to jerk the coffee drinker around and put white sugar in a brown sachet… and brown sugar in some other colour…?
Perhaps there is more to their madness than at first meets the eye. Perhaps there is a conspiracy by the coffee manufacturers and their sugar making counterparts, to get us to mix the wrong sugar with our coffee thus making us buy another coffee and use another sugar all the while lining their corporate pockets with our hard earned cash!
Perhaps.
Tags: coffee, conspiracy, sugar