Are there differences of composition for a given product in different countries ?

In this part we wanted to compare the amount of sugar contained in different products that looks to be “the same”, across countries. Indeed, we wanted to know if those big companies known all around the world really adapt their products depending of the consumers they want to reach.

Each time, for the countries where different ‘same product’ where available with different amount of sugar, we decided to use the median.

The first product that came to our mind was, without big surprise, the well-known Coca-Cola.

Coca-Cola

Amount of sugar (in grams) in 100g of Coca-Cola, across the world.

The overall tendency on this first map is a bigger amount of sugar in the United states (11g) and in the Eastern countries (11.2 for Hungary and Slovakia and 10.9 for Czech Republic), compared to the rest of the world (mostly 10.6g).

Then, we decided to look at the sugar values for the famous Nutella (chocolate and hazelnut spread).

Nutella

Amount of sugar (in grams) in 100g of Nutella, across the world.

This second map shows greater amount of sugar in the United States (56.8g), Canada (56.9g), Australia (57.6g), Hungary (56.8g), as well as Algeria and Mali (56.8g), compared to the rest of the world (mostly 56.3g). Italy, Switzerland and Belgium had mid-values of 56.7g.

Finally, we wanted to focus on a sweet from the popular Haribo brand. Data were available for less countries because it appeared that different sweet types were sold in different countries. But to remain consistent we wanted to compare a same type of sweet. It seemed that one of the type available in most countries was the Haribo Gold-Bears sweets.

Haribo Gold Bears

Amount of sugar (in grams) in 100g of Gold Bears (Haribo sweet), across the world.

This last map shows only difference for the United States (53.66g) and the United Kingdom (58.4g), that present greater amount of sugar in comparison to the rest of the countries (46g).

In conclusion, we see that there are indeed differences in the composition of products (sugar for 100g here) depending of the country the company exports it to. We observe that globally, more sugar is added in products sold in North America and Eastern countries.

It is hard to drop conclusion about Australia because we do not always have data about this country, and when we do, it is usually only one, thus the median is not statistically significant compared to the other countries.
It is the same thing for the United Kingdom, it only shows an important difference for the Gold Bears, but we had only one Gold Bear product for this country, while we had much more for France or the United states for example, thus once again the median is not meaningful enough for this country to drop conclusions.