Whole wild blackberries, hand-picked in the forests at the foot of the Dinaric Alps, dried and lightly sweetened with apple juice. Nothing else goes in: no added sugar, no oil coating, no sulphites.
What it actually is
The bramble blackberry, Rubus fruticosus, is the fruit of the thorny hedgerow bramble — the one that scratches your arms if you pick it badly. It is worth saying clearly, because the supplier's own text tries to and gets tangled in it: this is not a mulberry. Mulberries grow on trees (Morus nigra, black; Morus alba, white — the one silkworms are fed on) and are a completely different plant family. They look similar dried, which is exactly why the confusion keeps happening.
A blackberry is also not a berry in the botanical sense. It is an aggregate fruit: each of those little glossy beads is its own tiny drupe, with its own seed, and they are all fused to a central core. That is why a blackberry falls apart into segments when it is overripe, and why it has that faintly gritty seediness a blueberry does not.
Wild, and why that matters here
Cultivated blackberries are bred large, soft and mild. Wild bramble fruit is smaller, darker, sharper and much more aromatic — it has to be, because the plant is not being optimised for shelf life. Drying concentrates that. The result is intense and a little tart, closer to a fruit leather than to a sweet.
An honest word about "sweetened with apple juice"
Apple juice concentrate is sugar. It is fructose and glucose, and your body does not treat it differently because it arrived from an apple. It is used here instead of sucrose because it keeps the ingredient list short and the flavour fruit-led, not because it makes the product sugar-free. Dried fruit is a concentrated sugar food by definition — you are eating the fruit with the water taken out.
Teeth
This is the part dried fruit rarely mentions. Sticky dried fruit clings to the grooves of molars far longer than fresh fruit does, which gives mouth bacteria a long, uninterrupted feed. Eat it with a meal rather than grazing on it through the afternoon, and rinse with water afterwards. Do not brush immediately — the fruit acids soften enamel briefly, so wait around half an hour.
treatfuls
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