What actually sweetens a Sweetkart sweet

Posted 31 July 2026

What "refined sugar" means

Refined sugar is what most people mean by plain white sugar: cane or beet juice boiled, filtered and stripped down until almost nothing is left but sucrose. It is cheap, it behaves predictably, and it is the backbone of most mithai you will find in a shop — the chashni a laddoo is bound with, the syrup a barfi is set with, the glaze on a soan papdi.

We do not use it. We also do not use jaggery, which often gets presented as the wholesome alternative but is still a sugar, only less refined. And we do not use artificial sweeteners.

What we use instead

The sweetness in our range comes from the fruit and the nuts themselves, plus honey where a recipe needs it. In practice that means four things.

• Dates (khajoor, khajur) — the base of our Date Bites. Dates do two jobs at once: they sweeten, and they bind. That second job is the one people underestimate. It is why the bites hold their shape without a sugar syrup to set them.
• Figs (anjeer) — what Anjeer Bites are built on. Figs bring a darker, jammier sweetness than dates, and the seeds give a faint crunch you can feel against the nuts.
• Honey — in the Energy Balls, and in Shahi Honey Gulkand Bites alongside gulkand.
• Monk fruit — in Protein Bites. Monk fruit, or luo han guo, is a small gourd whose extract is intensely sweet, so it is used in very small amounts. It lets a seed-and-nut bite read as a sweet without anything refined going in.

A note on gulkand

Gulkand deserves its own line because it is not a sweetener so much as a whole ingredient. It is rose petals preserved over time until they break down into a dark, fragrant, jam-like preserve — a preparation that has been made in Indian kitchens for centuries and is still eaten by the spoonful in summer. In our Shahi Honey Gulkand Bites it does something sugar cannot: it brings a floral note that sits underneath the nuts rather than on top of them.

What it changes about the taste

Refined sugar flattens things. It is one loud note and it tends to sit over whatever else is in the recipe. Take it out and the other ingredients have to carry the sweet — which means you taste the pistachio, the roasted almond, the rose in the gulkand, in a way you simply do not when there is syrup over the top.

It also means our sweets are less uniformly sweet than shop mithai, and that is deliberate. A date-based bite tastes like dates. If you have grown up on sugar-set barfi the first one is a small adjustment — and then it is difficult to go back.

There is a texture difference too. Sugar syrup sets hard and gives you that clean snap a barfi has. Dates and figs set soft and dense, so our bites are chewier and heavier in the hand than a piece of mithai the same size.

What else we leave out

No preservatives and no additives, which is the other half of the same decision. It is also why our sweets do not keep for a year the way a factory-made box does: three months for the bites, the brittles and the boxes, and six for the trail mix and Nutri Masala Crunch, which are dry rather than bound.

Why we bother

Anchal started making these at home for two reasons: our own sweet cravings, and the daily question of what goes into the kids' school tiffin. Neither of those is solved by a box of syrup-set mithai. Once you are making sweets for your own children every day, the shortcut stops being worth it — and that is genuinely the whole origin of the recipe list we sell today.

Where to start

If you are trying the range for the first time, Date Bites are the clearest example of the idea — a handful of ingredients doing all the work. If you are buying for someone else, the Festive Box carries six of the bites so they can find their own favourite. The full range and current prices are on the menu, and there is more on the ingredients themselves in our guide to dry fruit sweets.