Understanding food labels

What are food labels?

A cartoon boy and robot, both wearing a chef's hat and an apron, smiling and waving

Labels on packaging include lots of helpful information about what foods and drinks contain.

This information can help us to decide if we want to buy or consume the product.

Food labels can also make the product look more appealing and might encourage us to choose the product.

Food label information

The information on a food label helps us to know how healthy a product is and the nutrition it provides.

It can give us other useful information such as:

when it needs to be consumed by
how to store the product
what the product contains

Look at this slideshow to find out more about the information that a food label provides.

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Name of the food
This tells us what the food is. It can sometimes have a picture of the food when it is cooked or how it might look when you serve it. The label can also tell you the serving size, which shows how many people the food is ideally for.
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Ingredients
By law, most food must display the list of ingredients in the product, unless there is only one ingredient, such as rice. Allergens must be displayed in bold text so they can be seen clearly. An allergen is an ingredient that people could be allergic to or have an intolerance of, such as milk.
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Cooking instructions
Food labels usually have information on how to cook or prepare the product. It can sometimes be written instructions or a symbol like a pan with the cooking time.
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Storage instructions
Some foods, like fresh soup or milk, need to be kept in the fridge. Frozen items, such as ice cream, need to be kept in a freezer. Dried and tinned foods, such as rice or tinned tomatoes, can be stored in a cupboard. We need to know how to store the food correctly to keep it safe to eat. Storage instructions can also tell you how long to keep the food for once it has been opened.
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Weight
This tells us how much the food weighs, usually in grams (g) or kilograms (kg).
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Use-by and best-before dates
Most products must show a use-by date or a best-before date. A use-by date tells us that we must only use the product up until that date. It isn’t safe to eat food after the use-by date. A best-before date means that after that date, the food may not taste as good. As long as the product has been stored correctly, it is usually still safe to eat after the best-before date.

Ingredients

With so much information on the packaging of food and drinks, it is important to understand how the information is displayed to help us to make healthier choices.

For example, the list of ingredients on food packaging must be written in order of weight.

Therefore, the list starts with the main ingredients at the top and the ingredients with the lowest weight at the bottom.

Looking at the ingredients list on the packaging below, you can see that the main ingredient is mixed cereals.

A black label with white text, listing out ingredients of a cereal bar

Nutritional information

The ingredients in foods and drinks provide our bodies with such as:

carbohydrate
fibre
protein
fat
vitamins
minerals

This is called the nutritional information and it can be found in a table on food labels, like this label from a tin of baked beans.

Typical values	Per 100g
Energy	392 kJ / 89 kcals
Fat	0.4g
Carbohydrate	14.7g
Fibre	4.8g
Protein	4.6g
Salt	0.49g

Traffic light labels

Traffic light labels can be displayed on the front of food and drink packaging.

They help people to understand more about the contents of the food and drinks that they consume.

The traffic light label is colour-coded in green, amber and red, just like the colours on traffic lights.

The colours show whether the amounts of fat, , sugars and salt per 100g are low, medium or high.

You can also see how many grams of each ingredient are in the food or drink per serving.

A nutritional traffic light label with fat and saturates in green, sugars in red and salt in orange — Image caption,
This is an example of a traffic light label.

What do the traffic light colours mean?

Have a look at the slideshow below to find out more about what the colours mean and how they can help us to make healthy choices.

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Green
Green means the food or drink is low in either fat, saturated fat, sugar or salt. The more green you see the healthier the food or drink is. Green means go for it!
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Amber
Amber means medium. If a food or drink has amber on the front-of-pack label, it is neither high nor low in either fat, saturated fat, sugar or salt. You can enjoy a food or drink with some or mostly amber on the label most of the time.
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Red
Red means high. This tells us that the food or drink is high in either fat, saturated fat, sugar or salt. We can still enjoy foods with red on the food label, but too much of them can affect our health. This means that we should eat these foods less often and in smaller amounts.

Key words

Ingredients	A list of different foods that make up a recipe, food product or meal.
Serving size	A serving size or portion is often written on food packaging to give an idea of how much of the food one person is recommended to eat.
Nutrients	Nutrients are substances found in food that carry out certain jobs in the body.
Saturated fat	A type of fat that mostly comes from animals.

Quiz: High, medium or low?

Do you know what a traffic light label can tell us about a food? Test your knowledge with this quiz.

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What are food labels?

Food label information

Ingredients

Nutritional information

Traffic light labels

What do the traffic light colours mean?

Key words

Quiz: High, medium or low?

More on Cooking and nutrition

����tv

What are food labels?

Food label information

Ingredients

Nutritional information

Traffic light labels

What do the traffic light colours mean?

Key words

Quiz: High, medium or low?

More on Cooking and nutrition

��tv