How to read an Indian food label
Turn the pack over. Almost everything worth knowing is in the nutrition table and the ingredient list, and you can get a usable answer from four numbers: sugar, sodium, saturated fat and fibre — read per 100 g, not per serving. This page walks through what each part of an Indian label means, in the order it is worth reading.
Most people already look. Research on Indian shoppers found that around 90% read something on the pack, but mostly the manufacturing or expiry date; only about a third read the nutrition information, and the most common reason given for skipping it was that it is too technical. The table is not hard once you know which rows carry the weight.
Read the per-100 g column, not the per-serving one
Indian labels usually print two columns: per 100 g (or 100 ml) and per serving. The serving size is chosen by the manufacturer, so it is the one number on the table that is not a fact about the food. A small serving makes every figure beside it look small.
Per 100 g is the only column that lets you compare two packs, so read that one, and use the serving column afterwards to work out what you will actually eat. The arithmetic, and where it goes wrong.
The four numbers worth reading first
Sugar
Look for total sugars, and for added sugars if the pack declares them separately. Above roughly 10 g of added sugar per 100 g a food is high in sugar by ICMR-NIN's guidance. Drink powders and confectionery clear that easily; a malted drink powder is commonly in the thirties or forties per 100 g of powder.
Sodium
The daily reference is 2,000 mg of sodium, which is about 5 g of salt. Divide the pack's sodium figure by 20 to get the percentage of a day's reference in every 100 g. Savoury snacks are where this bites: fried mixtures in our set run from about 600 to 1,950 mg per 100 g.
Saturated fat
Separate from total fat and the more useful of the two. Note that Indian rules require saturated and trans fat rows only above a fat threshold, so a genuinely low-fat pack that omits them is following the rules rather than hiding something.
Fibre
The one number you want to be high. Around 3 g per 100 g is where it starts to count for a food; 6 g and above is genuinely good. A biscuit claiming to be a fibre product with 2 g per 100 g is making a marketing point, not a nutritional one.
What real packs look like
Figures from labels we have read, per 100 g, described by category rather than named.
The point of putting these side by side is the spread. Two savoury snacks can differ threefold in sodium, and nothing on the front of either pack tells you which is which.
The ingredient list is ordered by weight
Ingredients are listed heaviest first. If sugar or refined flour is in the first three, that is the food, whatever the front says. A few things to know about how Indian lists are written:
- “Edible vegetable oil” often means palm or palmolein, which does not have to be named specifically. More on this.
- INS numbers are additives — INS 330 is citric acid, INS 211 is a preservative, INS 627 and 631 are flavour enhancers. What each one is.
- Compound ingredients break out in brackets, so sugar can appear more than once under different names and never look like the largest single item.
What a pack must declare, and what it need not
Indian labelling rules require a pack to declare these when present: milk, egg, fish, crustacean, nuts, soy, gluten and sulphites. If you react to one of those, the label has to tell you.
These are not separately required, and their absence from a label is not evidence they are absent from the food: sesame, mustard, palm oil, maida, vanaspati, gelatin, lactose and caffeine. This is the single most useful thing to know about an Indian label, and it is the reason reading the ingredient list matters as much as the table.
Common questions
Is there a warning label on the front?
Not yet. A star-based Indian Nutrition Rating has been in draft since 2022 and the Supreme Court pushed the regulator on it again in 2026, but nothing is mandatory, which is why the back of the pack is still the only reliable source. Where the rules stand.
Does “no added sugar” mean no sugar?
No. It means none was added as such, and it permits fruit concentrates, syrups, jaggery and maltodextrin. What each front-of-pack claim actually permits.
What if the numbers look impossible?
Misprints happen. A spice mix at 12,862 mg of sodium per 100 g is plausible for a seasoning eaten by the pinch and absurd on a tea. If a figure seems wrong for the kind of food it is, it may well be.
यही जानकारी हिन्दी में: फूड लेबल कैसे पढ़ें.
Photograph the nutrition table on a pack and get a score out of 100, with the reason behind every point.
Scan a label