Coca-Cola reducing the sugar in even its full-sugar drinks in Australia

DAVID WALKER/FAIRFAX NZ

Coca-Cola Australia is reducing the sugar content in many of its most popular soft drinkgs.

Coca-Cola New Zealand is aiming to reduce the sugar across its entire portfolio by 10 per cent by 2020.

It was reported today that the Coca-Cola Company's Australian bottler is changing the recipes of some of its biggest-selling soft drinks to make them lower in sugar, amid a consumer backlash against sugar consumption and growing calls for a sugar tax.

More than 30 countries including the United Kingdom, Ireland and Mexico will have sugar taxes in place by the end of this year to help tackle the obesity crisis.

Coca-Cola Amatil managing director Alison Watkins said while she did not believe sugar taxes improved public health, the company was nonetheless trying to cut the sugar levels in the products it sold in Australia and New Zealand.

Watkins said it was doing this by introducing low- or no-sugar varieties of its major soft-drink brands, such as Coca-Cola No Sugar, but also by changing the formulas of the "original" products without rebranding them.

New Zealanders were the first in the world to be able to purchase Coca-Cola Stevia No Sugar.

Five Coke products have had their sugar reduced since 2015. Seven more reformulations are planned this year.

"We're doing it either just by making things less sweet over time, gradually, or by using stevia, which is a naturally derived sweetener, to replace some of the sugar,"  Watkins said.

"We see a lot more opportunities to come."

As of last year, the company planned all of its new products to be reduced, low or no sugar.

In the past two years it had lowered the amount of sugar in Lift by 23 per cent (from about 10 teaspoons of sugar in each can to eight), Sprite by 26 per cent, "Blue" Powerade by 20 per cent and Deep Spring by 26 per cent, Watkins said.

The company was working towards on a lower-sugar formula for Fanta, she said.

Beverage companies in the UK dramatically reduced the sugar content of their products ahead of a sugar tax come into effect there in April, and government research suggested those reformulation alone would save 30,000 tonnes of sugar from being consumed every year.

But Watkins said CCA was changing its products to help fight obesity and meet consumer demand for lower-sugar products, rather than to prepare for an impending tax.