How to read a European food label — and why most calorie apps mislead you

A European food label is not the same as an American one. Not slightly different — it reports in different units, against a different reference quantity, in a different order. If you log European food in an app built on American conventions, you are almost certainly miscounting.

This post walks through what each line actually means.

What is mandatory, and in what order

Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 requires the nutrition declaration on prepacked food to appear in exactly this order:

1. Energy (kJ and kcal)
2. Fat
3. — of which saturates
4. Carbohydrate
5. — of which sugars
6. Protein
7. Salt

The order is neither arbitrary nor optional. If you see a different order, it is not an EU label.

Per 100 grams, not per serving

This is the biggest practical difference. On a European label, values refer to 100 grams or 100 millilitres. That is mandatory. A per-serving column may appear alongside it, but cannot replace it.

American labels invert this: the serving is primary, and a per-100 g figure often is not shown at all.

The consequence is that when you search a product in an American app you get per-serving data, while the pack in your hand shows per-100 g data. Conflating the two typically produces a 30–50 per cent error.

This is why my calorie tracker asks for per-100 g values and scales them to your actual portion.

kJ and kcal — both required

In the EU, energy must be declared in both kilojoules and kilocalories, with kJ first. The conversion is fixed: 1 kcal = 4.184 kJ.

In practice most people work in kcal, which is fine. Just do not confuse the two: a 2 000 kJ product is not 2 000 calories, it is roughly 478.

Salt, not sodium

EU labels declare salt, not sodium. American labels declare sodium. The conversion is salt = sodium × 2.5.

This matters because if you read sodium from an American database and treat it as salt, you underestimate your salt intake by a factor of 2.5. The daily reference is 6 grams of salt — equivalent to 2.4 grams of sodium.

Fibre and the hidden calories

Here is a difference almost nobody mentions. Annex XIV of the EU regulation sets the energy conversion factors, and it counts fibre at 8 kJ/g — roughly 2 kcal per gram.

American practice frequently treats fibre as 0 calories. On a high-fibre product that produces a visible gap between the label and the app — and the app is not “wrong” in the abstract, it is simply applying a different rule from the packaging in your hand.

The same applies to polyols (10 kJ/g) and to erythritol, which the regulation explicitly counts as 0 kJ/g.

The trap in the “%RI” column

Many labels carry a percentage of reference intake. It refers to the theoretical average adult at 8 400 kJ / 2 000 kcal.

It is not about you. If you weigh 55 kg and work at a desk, 2 000 kcal is too much. If you weigh 90 kg and train six times a week, it is far too little. %RI is useful for comparing two products — not for telling you how much you can eat.

A quick sanity check

If you are unsure about a value, work backwards. Energy should reconcile with the macros:

• protein: 17 kJ/g (4 kcal)
• carbohydrate: 17 kJ/g (4 kcal)
• fat: 37 kJ/g (9 kcal)
• fibre: 8 kJ/g (2 kcal)

If it lands within 10–15 per cent, the label is sound. If it is badly off, you have misread something — or the product contains alcohol or polyols, which carry their own factors.

That reconciliation is built into my tracker: add a custom food without filling in the energy, and it calculates it for you using these official EU factors.