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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.

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

Image gallerySkip image gallerySlide 1 of 6, An illustrated soup carton containing an image of a bowl of soup, with the words vegetable soup, serves two, ingredients, vegetable stock, potatoes, milk in bold text, carrots, cooking instructions, with a image of a pan with 5 mins inside, storage, keep refrigerated, once opened use within two days and by the use-by date, five hundred and fifty grams and use by 01 May, 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

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
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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 valuesPer 100g
Energy392 kJ / 89 kcals
Fat0.4g
Carbohydrate14.7g
Fibre4.8g
Protein4.6g
Salt0.49g
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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.
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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.

Image gallerySkip image gallerySlide 1 of 3, A traffic light with the green light lit up at the bottom. The amber and red lights are off., 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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Key words

IngredientsA list of different foods that make up a recipe, food product or meal.
Serving sizeA 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.
NutrientsNutrients are substances found in food that carry out certain jobs in the body.
Saturated fatA type of fat that mostly comes from animals.
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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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More on Cooking and nutrition

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