The label says all 7g sugar are added but there is no sugar in the ingredients.
I know oats do have naturally occurring sugars.
The brand is oat from Costco:
I've noticed the Califia Barista Oat milk brand has only 3g sugar / 240 ml.
So is there added sugar ?
Seems like this is a thing in the Oat Milk world, these guys went even further:
They are from the oats, which contain no sugar as a raw ingredient. Processing them to make milk converts some of the starch to sugar, so it is counted as added sugar as it does not appear in the raw ingredient.
From an article entitled Oatly challenged over “no added sugars” claim:
... the enzymatic process it uses to create its base oat milk (water + oats) effectively “creates sugars in situ” by breaking down oat starch into simple sugars. ... All oats in an oat beverage are processed, therefore all the naturally occurring sugars in the final product are considered added.
The same article provides an update about this from the FDA specific to the Nutrition Facts Label:
In our Nutrition Facts Label Q&A guidance issued in November 2017, we addressed sugars created through processes such as hydrolysis: When an ingredient containing mono- and disaccharides that are created through controlled hydrolosys... is added to a food during processing, those mono- and disaccharides contributed by the ingredient need to be declared as added sugars on the label.
The other answer is correct, but it should be noted that it is not the processing inherent to making oatmilk that breaks these starches into sugars, it's extra processing, as they noted, through enzymes. In my experience, Pacific foods oatmilk is by far the sweetest oatmilk, even though they also have no sugar ingredient. Different sugar levels from almost none to cloying can be had from just the oats, so I guess you just have to check the nutrition facts every time.
