fructose
Fructose is fruit's sugar refined out of the fruit — sweeter than sucrose gram for gram, and a sugars-list citizen like the rest of the shelf.
Also appears on labels as: crystalline fructose
What it is
Crystalline fructose, the sweetest common sugar. In whole fruit it arrives diluted by fiber and water; refined on a label it's concentrated sweetness with none of the chaperones.
Why it's in pet food
High sweetness at low inclusion — a little goes far in palatability work. The 'fruit sugar' name lends a natural glow the refined crystal hasn't earned.
How Bowlmark scores it
Scores are deterministic math over the printed label — the rules below apply to every product identically, and nothing estimates or fills in a blank.
A sugars-list term for the ≥2-distinct → −8 rule; not on the top-10 flag's names. The useful contrast is with the produce pages: blueberries in a recipe bring fructose WITH fiber, polyphenols, and a bonus seat; crystalline fructose brings the sweet alone, and the engine's respective treatments encode exactly that difference.
Foods that list fructose
No food on the shelf lists fructose yet. Scan a bag that does and its label joins the catalog — versioned from the day it arrives.
Sources
Related ingredients
Further reading
Cite this page
Bowlmark. "Fructose in pet food — what it is and how it scores." https://www.bowlmark.com/ingredient/fructose
- Engine
- Methodology engine v1.1.0 · config 13c99e2f
- Verified
- Last verified August 12, 2026
No stored score to stamp yet — the engine and config above are the ones a scan runs today.