The Nutri-Score Explained: Reading UK Labels and A–E Grades

Standing in a supermarket aisle with two similar packs in your hands, it is natural to want a quick answer. Labels try to give you one, but the UK and much of Europe have taken different routes.

The Nutri-Score turns a product's nutrition into a single letter on a five-colour scale, from a dark green A to an orange-red E. It was developed by public health researchers in France and is now overseen by an independent European scientific committee, which updated the method in 2022 so that the grades line up more closely with dietary guidelines.

The grade is calculated from the nutrition values per 100 g, or per 100 ml for drinks. Points are added for energy, sugars, saturated fat and salt, and taken away for protein, fibre, and fruit, vegetables and legumes. The total is then placed in one of five bands.

In the UK, the front-of-pack label you will usually see is the colour-coded traffic light. Government guidance, written by the Department of Health and the Food Standards Agency with the devolved nations, sets out how it works and makes clear that front-of-pack labelling is voluntary.

Instead of one overall grade, the traffic light shows energy plus four separate nutrients: fat, saturates, sugars and salt. Each one is coloured red, amber or green, and the label usually also shows a percentage of an adult's reference intake for a stated portion.

The guidance is careful about what red means. A red does not mean you should not or cannot eat a food. It is a prompt to keep an eye on how often you choose it, or how much of it you have.

Those are the NHS guides for judging a food as high or low in each nutrient. They are handy to keep in mind even when a pack has no front-of-pack label at all, because the back-of-pack nutrition table is the part every pre-packed food has to carry.

Portion sizes on packs vary a great deal. One cereal might list a 30 g serving and another 45 g, which makes the per-portion figures hard to compare. Per 100 g puts every product on the same footing.

That is also the Nutri-Score's main limit. It tells you how a food compares per 100 g, not how much of it you will eat. A grade for a cooking oil and a grade for a yoghurt describe 100 g of each, and nobody eats them in the same amounts.

The most useful way to use either system is within a type of food: two breakfast cereals, two ready meals, two loaves of bread. That is where the comparison is fair.

A grade is a summary of nutrients. It does not describe allergens, how processed a food is, or whether the ingredients suit your own needs. A product can earn a good grade and still contain something you avoid, or carry a 'may contain' warning that matters to you.

It also cannot see your whole week of eating. A food with a lower grade can sit comfortably in a varied diet, and a food with a higher grade is not a free pass. If you have a medical condition or have been given dietary advice, that advice comes first.

Letters are easy to misread at a glance, and a bare letter does not say why. So when you scan a product in Vitababy, the Nutri-Score appears as a word: excellent, good, average, poor or bad, matching A to E. Beside it is one short line on the main reason for the grade.

When a product has no published rating, the app works out an estimated grade from its label instead. Alongside the grade you will see the ingredients, the nutrition per 100 g and the processing level, so the grade is one part of the picture rather than the whole of it.

Is the Nutri-Score used in the UK?

Not officially. The UK government's recommended front-of-pack scheme is the colour-coded traffic light, and it is voluntary. The Nutri-Score was developed in France and has been adopted by several European countries, so you may occasionally see it on products made for those markets.

Does a grade A mean I can eat as much as I like?

No. The grade describes the nutritional profile per 100 g compared with other foods. It does not account for portion size, your whole diet, allergies or any medical advice you have been given.

Why can two foods with the same grade look so different?

The grade bundles several nutrients into one result, so different mixes can land on the same letter. Checking the nutrition table side by side shows you where they actually differ.