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This was after he halted an increase last year following his February 2022 budget speech, in which he announced that an increase was on the cards. He added government was also still working on its national dietary intake survey with the hopes of identifying what South Africans were consuming that could be the cause of the obesity problem the country was facing.
Government introduced a sugar tax on sugar-sweetened beverages with a sugar content of over 4g of sugar per 100ml. "When the sugar tax was introduced, the industry lost 250 000 tonnes of sugar, which we had to export, in just the first year. In monetary terms, that translates to R1.2 billion rand." She explained that should a change be made to the threshold at which the tax was below the current 4g, it could lead to SSB-producing companies reformulating the products in an effort to find replacements for sugar.