Last reviewed: July 2026

The nutrition label, fully annotated

A nutrition label is a legal declaration of what sits in 100 g of a food, plus an optional column for one serving that the brand chose itself. In the EU seven lines are mandatory and they always appear per 100 g or per 100 ml, which is the only column that lets you compare two products fairly. Three of those lines carry most of the useful information: energy, protein, and sugars plus salt. The rest is detail you can read when you care.

The seven lines the EU requires

Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 fixes both the content and the order: energy, fat, of which saturates, carbohydrate, of which sugars, protein, salt. Energy must appear in kilojoules and kilocalories. Fibre is voluntary in the EU, which is why plenty of European packs simply omit it. The United States runs a different panel: it leads with a serving-sized column, splits out added sugars, and requires fibre, vitamin D, calcium, iron and potassium, but it prints sodium in milligrams instead of salt in grams.

One real label, line by line

The table below is an actual entry from the Dietly database, a Kashi Vanilla Almond cereal. The left column is the legal per 100 g declaration. The right column is what the brand's own stated serving, one cup or 109 g, works out to.

Values are the label as recorded on the linked product page and are rounded here. Serving-column figures are the per-100 g values scaled by 1.09.

The five annotations that matter

• "Of which" is a subset. Saturates are part of the fat total and sugars are part of the carbohydrate total. Adding them again double counts, which is the single most common misreading of a panel.
• Two energy units, one number. Kilojoules are the legal primary unit in the EU and kilocalories are what most people count. The conversion never changes, so a pack that lists 1,804 kJ is telling you 431 kcal. See kilojoules versus kilocalories.
• Salt is not sodium. EU labels print salt in grams, US labels print sodium in milligrams, and the factor between them is 2.5. The World Health Organization advises under 5 g of salt a day for adults, so a product at 1 g per 100 g is worth noticing. See sodium versus salt.
• Fibre may be missing rather than absent. A blank fibre line on a European pack usually means the manufacturer did not declare it, not that the food contains none.
• Percent reference intake is not about you. Those percentages assume an average adult eating 2,000 kcal with 90 g of sugars and 6 g of salt. They are a scale for the product, not a personal target.

Per 100 g is the only honest comparison column

Servings differ wildly between products, so serving columns cannot be compared with each other. Per 100 g they can. Four real entries make the point: plain Greek nonfat yogurt at 59 kcal, extra sharp cheddar slices at 381 kcal, the cereal above at 431 kcal, and crunchy peanut butter at 594 kcal per 100 g. That ladder tells you more in five seconds than any front-of-pack badge, and it is exactly what energy density describes.

What the label is not

It is not a measurement of the packet in your hand. Under EU rules a producer may derive the declared values from laboratory analysis, from calculation using known ingredient values, or from generally accepted published data, and all three are legal. Guidance allows a tolerance of roughly 20 percent for many nutrients before a value counts as wrong, which is why two packs of the same product can genuinely differ. Rounding rules add a little more slack. Treat every number as a good estimate, as covered in how accurate calorie labels are.

The panel also says nothing about ingredient quality, additives or processing. That information lives in the ingredient list next to it, in descending order by weight.

A three-glance method

1. Energy per 100 g. Places the food on the density ladder immediately.
2. Protein per 100 g. The best single predictor of whether a food will keep you full.
3. Sugars and salt per 100 g. The two lines that most often reveal what a product really is.

Then glance at the serving size and ask whether it resembles what you would actually eat. Often it does not, which is a game with its own rules, covered in serving-size games. To put two labels side by side without arithmetic, use the comparison tool.

Bottom line

Seven mandatory lines, always per 100 g, with "of which" marking subsets and salt hiding behind sodium. Read energy, protein, sugars and salt per 100 g, check the serving size for realism, and treat every figure as an estimate with about 20 percent of play in it.