About... juice.

Like most fastiduous middle class people who take an interest in the development of their children, we do not brook the purchase of any soft drinks other than 100% fruit juice. No 'drink' or 'nectar' or 'cordial' or 'squash' or indeed napój. Fizzy sugary drinks? Heavens forfend! It's got to be Sok 100%.

Time was, when all Polish fruit juices were outstanding - 100% fruit at farcically low prices. I remember back in the early '90s meeting a British guy in Kraków, working for what was then Beechams, whose thankless task was to sell Ribena to Polish mums. At the time, the product was being sold only in certain regions in Poland, and yet there was no way then to deliver TV advertising regionally. So mums and children across Poland were being subjected to ads for a product that they could not buy. But why would they want to?

Back in the early-mid '90s, the only blackcurrent juices generally available in Poland were, well, 100% blackcurrent. And much, much cheaper than Ribena, which had to be trucked half way across Europe. So for obvious reasons, it never caught on here.

Then economics caught a hold of the Polish soft drinks industry. Little by little, fruit content started dropping, the word sok (juice) started being edged off packaging and replaced by weasel words like 100% smaku (100% taste), and the packaging design and marketing became slicker and slicker, prices started inching towards those found on products in UK shops. The Tymbark brand, owned by Maspex, has for a long time had the best-looking cartons and labels, and Tymbark was what found its way into our home for many, many years.

But fight back has started. A year ago, Agros Nova, producer of the Fortuna brand, launched an ad campaign suggesting that your average carton of soft drink masquerading as 'fruit juice' has high sugar and low fruit content. Fortuna juices are 100% fruit.

Worked on me.

We now buy Fortuna cartons and Tarczyn bottled orange juice (also an Agros Nova brand, also 100% fruit). Eddie takes the 300ml bottles to school, plus they always have an interesting fact printed under the cap. Example. "The population of China today is greater than the entire number of people alive on the Earth in 1860". Or, "The world's biggest car park, for 20,000 cars, is in Canada." We get through dozens of bottles a week.

Do take a moment, though, to look at Fortuna's labelling. Its blackcurrent juice is actually "JUICE of grape and BLACKCURRENT WITHOUT additional SUGAR or sweeteners JUICE 100%". To labour the point, a circular blue sticker reads: "100% juices are exclusively fruit. According to the law, you cannot add sweeteners to fruit juices." What we are not told, however, is what is the blackcurrent content of this 100% fruit juice; the label merely says "100% grape-blackcurrant juice", suggesting that grape is indeed the main constituent of the product. Ribena, ready to drink in carton form, contains (according to its website), 6% blackcurrent juice. Plus an unspecified amount of added sugar.

A propos of shopping. My local hypermarket has put on a little display (above) reminding sated shoppers that it's 20 years ago this week that the heroic Prof. Leszek Balcerowicz introduced his shock therapy to Poland. He dismantled the communist economic system at a stroke, liberalising prices, stopping soft loans to loss-making state enterprises, and letting free enterprise fill up the shelves. (They looked a bit like the one pictured, except without all that meat on the right hand side.) Inflation fell from 800% a year to something a bit more manageable, unemployment shot up from zero to 13%. The losers from that shock have suffered to this day, but overall, the economy is in sound shape. Although public finances are long overdue for reform.