Types of fruits and vegetables used in commercial baby foods and their contribution to sugar content

Fruits and vegetables ( F & V ) are often featured in names of commercial baby foods ( CBF s). We aimed to survey all available CBF s in the UK market with F & V included in the food name in order to describe the amount and types of F & V used in CBF and their contribution to total sugar content. Food labels were used to identify F & V and total sugar content. Fruits were more common than vegetables in names of the 329 CBF s identified. The six most common F & V in the names were all relatively sweet: apple, banana, tomato, mango, carrot and sweet potato. The percentage of F & V in the foods ranged from a median of 94% for sweet‐spoonable to 13% for dry‐savoury products. Fruit content of sweet foods (n = 177) was higher than vegetable content of savoury foods (n = 152) with a median ( IQR ) of 64.0 g/100 g (33.0–100.0) vs. 46.0 g/100 g (33–56.7). Fruit juice was added to 18% of products. The proportion of F & V in CBF correlated significantly with sugar content for all the food types except dry‐savoury food (sweet‐spoonable r = 0.24, P  = 0.006; savoury‐spoonable r = 0.65, P  < 0.001; sweet‐dry r = 0.81, P  < 0.001; savoury‐dry r = 0.51, P  = 0.06) and explained up to two‐thirds of the variation in sugar content. The F & V content of CBFs mainly consists of fruits and relatively sweet vegetables which are unlikely to encourage preferences for bitter‐tasting vegetables or other non‐sweet foods. F & V contribute significantly to the total sugar content, particularly of savoury foods.