How embarrassing is your coffee order – and is your favourite milky drink doing more harm than good?

As prepackaged milkshakes and lattes get hit with a new sugar tax, Lydia Spencer-Elliott rethinks her daily calorific latte habit and asks is it time to wake up and smell the (actual) coffee?

Wednesday 26 November 2025 06:00 GMT

While open cup milkshakes and coffee drinks are exempt from the government’s latest sugar tax, their calorific content can still be a problem 

When I order my coffee in the morning I feel like a Labubu toting teenager. For, it takes me roughly quadruple the time to order “an iced white chocolate matcha latte with oat milk” compared to the person next to me’s simple “Americano”.

Although delicious, my preferred beverage is not exactly a mature drink request; And now that the government has announced both milkshakes and lattes will be hit with a sugar tax to help tackle child obesity levels, it’s never been more embarrassing, infantile or unhealthy to have an eight word long coffee order. Worryingly, mine isn’t even the worst of it; there are banana bread, carrot cake, and blondie brownie options, too.

While ‘open-cup’ milkshakes prepared in cafés, bars and restaurants will remain out of scope of the new sugar tax rules, it’s worth noting that Starbucks’s prepackaged caramel frappuccino which has 9.4g of sugar per 100ml could be impacted when companies are charged in January 2028. And many specialty coffees, whether store bought or not, are essentially adult milkshakes, with some containing more than 500 calories which doesn’t exactly make them a healthy option either.

This is a quarter of a woman’s daily recommended intake and the equivalent to consuming 3.8 packets of Walkers crisps, 100g of pasta with pesto, three slices of buttered toast – or 8.3 shots of tequila before lunch. Two calorie Americano, anyone?

“When you look at many of the pre-packaged iced coffees and flavoured lattes on supermarket shelves, it’s not surprising they’ve been swept into the sugar-tax conversation,” reflects nutritionist and author of Unprocess Your Life: Break Free from Ultra-processed Foods for Good, Rob Hobson of the law change. “They are ultra processed foods with ingredients like flavourings, sweeteners and stabilisers such as carrageenan, [which can irritate a sensitive gut].”

Hobson adds that the calorie content of these drinks is easy to underestimate as most people don’t think of a drink as a snack, despite what it contains. “The key issue is that liquid calories don’t trigger the same fullness signals as sold food, so you end up taking on extra energy without any real impact on appetite,” he explains. Meaning, realistically, you’ll want a pastry, too.

“Ready-to-drink coffees have a “light” health halo because they’re seen as just coffee with milk. The reality is that many contain enough sugar to edge them into sweetened beverage territory.”

(Getty/iStock)

Previously, sugar laws have mainly affected fizzy drinks. But as the chancellor Rachel Reeves has abandoned plans to increase the basic rate of income tax, she has been forced to rely on an array of smaller tax rises on high value properties, electric cars, gambling and tourism to generate funds. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has described these as“nanny-state” measures and accused Keir Starmer of increasing taxes on the “simple pleasures that we all enjoy”.

However, when it comes to pre-packaged food and drinks, we might enjoy such simple pleasures, but the harm they are being linked to is being highlighted almost daily.

According to Government analysis, around 203 pre-packed milk-based drinks – accounting for 93 per cent of sales in the category – will face the sugar tax unless their sugar content is cut under the new proposals. The Treasury said young people only get 3.5 per cent of their calcium intake from dairy drinks, meaning “it is also likely that the health benefits do not justify the harms from excess sugar”.

“By bringing milk-based drinks and milk substitute drinks into the SDIL, the Government would introduce a tax incentive for manufacturers of these drinks to build on existing progress and further reduce sugar in their recipes,” it said.

A review, published last week, found that UPFs are linked to harm in every major organ system of the human body and pose a huge threat to global health. In the last year on record, 64 per cent of adults living in England were estimated to be overweight or living with obesity. If we’re going to eat like unattended children, the government might need to be our appropriate adult and make changes to what’s allowed to be put in our food by big companies. If anything, they could be being stricter.

“There’s nothing wrong with enjoying these drinks occasionally, but you are better off getting a simpler coffee from somewhere that is just coffee and milk,” Hobson reasons. “It’s worth being aware of what’s in them. The sugar-tax-driven reformulation may end up being a positive step if it encourages more transparency and helps people better understand what they’re drinking.”

When the sugar tax was announced in 2016, it resulted in the sugar content in soft drinks falling by 46 per cent. As the levy was on drinks with a sugar content of more than 5g per 100ml, many drinks now hover below the 5g threshold as a result. To up the ante, the accepted sugar content is decreasing even further, to 4.5g. This could see sugar content in some store bought Starbucks drinks decrease by more than half. So, things will be tasting a little different come the new year. Either that, or the drink could be hitting our wallets even harder to put us off it.

Shame, perhaps, should be enough to do that. Adults guzzling flavoured milk is, regretfully, deeply unchic compared to a low calorie espresso. Maybe, it’s time to wake up and smell the (actual) coffee.