Dried Fruit vs Candied Fruit: What You Are Actually Buying

Walk down any supermarket aisle and the dried cranberries all look the same: red, glossy, roughly the same size. They are not the same product, and the difference shows up in both the taste and the ingredient list.

Three things can happen to a piece of fruit

Dried

Water is removed and nothing is added. The sugar concentrates because the water left, not because sugar arrived. Figs, prunes, apricots and mulberries are usually sold this way. They taste intensely of themselves and are darker and less uniform than most people expect.

Infused

The fruit is dried and rehydrated in a juice — apple juice is the common one. This puts sweetness and moisture back without adding refined sugar, which matters for fruit like cranberries that are far too sour to eat plain. The result stays soft, and it tastes of fruit rather than syrup.

Candied

The fruit is steeped in sugar syrup until sugar largely replaces the water. It is sweet, bright and shelf-stable, and it is closer to a confection than to fruit. There is nothing wrong with candied fruit — but it should be bought knowingly, especially if the reason you are buying dried fruit is that you wanted fruit.

How to tell them apart before you open the bag

• Read the second ingredient. If it is sugar, glucose syrup or corn syrup, the fruit is sweetened. If it is a juice, it is infused. If there is no second ingredient, it is simply dried.
• Look at the colour. Uniform, almost neon colour usually means sugar and often colouring. Naturally dried fruit is uneven and duller.
• Check the texture through the packet. Candied fruit is firm and slightly sticky. Well-dried fruit yields when pressed.

Where "soft dried" fits

Soft dried fruit is dried less far, so more water stays in. It eats better straight from the bag and needs to be stored more carefully, because the same moisture that makes it pleasant also shortens its life once opened. Our organic figs, apricots, plums and mulberries are all soft dried for that reason.

What this means for mixes

In a fruit and nut mix the failure mode is that one aggressively sweet ingredient drowns everything else. That is why our mixes use apple-juice infused cranberries rather than sugar-sweetened ones — next to raisins, walnuts and macadamias, a candied cranberry is the only thing you would taste.