Recipe in · regulated panel out
Nutrition label maker
This nutrition label maker builds a finished FDA panel from a list of ingredients: weigh each line, sum the nutrients, divide by the servings the batch yields, then apply the declaration rules of 21 CFR 101.9. A twelve-muffin tray is loaded below and already labelled. Change the servings, swap an ingredient, add one of 5,276 USDA foods, and every number moves — including the arithmetic underneath it.
Blueberry Muffins: 210 calories per serving of 1 muffin (75g).
Ingredient and allergen statements
INGREDIENTS: Enriched bleached wheat flour, Whole milk, Blueberries, Sugar, Canola oil, Egg, Baking powder, Salt.
Contains: Milk, Egg, Wheat.
Alternative wording using the 2%-or-less grouping — 21 CFR 101.4(a)(2)
INGREDIENTS: Enriched bleached wheat flour, Whole milk, Blueberries, Sugar, Canola oil, Egg. Contains 2 percent or less of baking powder, salt.
- Milk
- Egg
- Wheat
Show the arithmetic
| Ingredient | Weight | Per 100 g | Contributes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enriched bleached wheat flour | 250.0 g | 76.31 g | 190.78 g |
| Sugar | 150.0 g | 99.98 g | 149.97 g |
| Blueberries | 222.0 g | 14.49 g | 32.17 g |
| Whole milk | 244.0 g | 4.80 g | 11.71 g |
| Baking powder | 9.2 g | 27.70 g | 2.55 g |
| Egg | 50.0 g | 0.72 g | 0.36 g |
| Salt | 3.0 g | 0.00 g | 0.00 g |
| Canola oil | 71.9 g | 0.00 g | 0.00 g |
| Whole recipe | 387.53 g | ||
387.53 g ÷ 12 servings = 32.294 g per serving
1 g and above rounds to the nearest 1 g increment. → declared as 32g (101.9(c)(6))
32g ÷ Daily Value = 11.64% → 12% DV (101.9(d)(7)(ii))
Incomplete USDA data: Enriched bleached wheat flour, Sugar, Baking powder, Whole milk. Missing values are treated as zero, which can understate a nutrient. Vitamin D is the usual gap.
Why the gram weight of a cup is per ingredient, not universal
A measuring cup holds 236.59 millilitres of anything. What it weighs depends entirely on what you put in it. USDA publishes a cup weight per food, and the spread is not subtle: 125 g for all-purpose flour, 200 g for granulated sugar, 220 g for packed brown sugar, 227 g for butter, 292 g for table salt, 339 g for honey. A label maker that uses one density for everything is wrong by up to a factor of two and a half on a single line.
LabelMath only offers a cup, tablespoon or teaspoon for an ingredient when USDA has published a cup weight for that specific food. Where USDA gives a cup but not a tablespoon, the smaller measures come from the definitional ratios — one US cup is exactly sixteen tablespoons and forty-eight teaspoons — which is safe because density does not change with scale. Ounces and pounds are always available, because those are masses and convert exactly.
The four numbers a label maker must not fudge
Servings per container.21 CFR 101.9(b)(8)(i) rounds it to the nearest whole serving, except between two and five servings where it rounds to the nearest half, and any rounding must be flagged with the word “about”.
The serving’s gram weight. 21 CFR 101.9(b)(7)(ii) uses whole grams above 5 g, half grams from 2 to 5 g, and tenths below 2 g. A one-tablespoon serving of jam at 21.2 g prints as 21 g; a 1.44 g serving of a spice blend prints as 1.4 g.
Every nutrient amount. Each one has its own increment ladder — see the FDA rounding rules in full.
Every percentage. Macronutrients go to whole percents; vitamins and minerals go to 2, 5 and 10 percent increments depending on the level. Two different rules on one panel.
“The number of servings shall be rounded to the nearest whole number except for the number of servings between 2 and 5 servings and random weight products. The number of servings between 2 and 5 servings shall be rounded to the nearest 0.5 serving. Rounding should be indicated by the use of the term about.”
Frequently asked questions
- What does a nutrition label maker have to get right?
- Three things, in order: the weight of each ingredient in grams, the per-serving amount after dividing by yield, and the declaration rules in 21 CFR 101.9(c). The first is where volume measures trip people up, because a cup is a volume and a gram is a mass, so a cup of flour at 125 g and a cup of honey at 339 g need different conversions. The third is where nearly every free tool fails, because the rules are increment ladders with different thresholds per nutrient, not decimal rounding.
- Can I edit the ingredient names on the label?
- Yes. USDA descriptions read back to front — 'Wheat flour, white, all-purpose, enriched, bleached' — which is correct for a database and wrong for an ingredient statement. Each line has an editable label that feeds the ingredient statement, so you can write 'Enriched wheat flour' or whatever your supplier's common or usual name is, while the nutrient values stay tied to the USDA record.
- Does the label maker handle added sugars?
- It does, and it asks you rather than guessing. Added sugars are defined in 21 CFR 101.9(c)(6)(iii) by how the food was made, not by what is in it, so no composition database can hold the answer. Pure sugars, syrups, honey and confectionery default to counting fully as added sugars; fruit, dairy and vegetables default to zero. Every line has a checkbox.
- Why does the tool ask for a finished weight?
- Because 21 CFR 101.9(b)(7) requires the serving size to carry a gram weight, and after baking, the tray weighs less than the ingredients did. The nutrients per serving do not change — water leaves, calories do not — but the grams printed beside '1 cookie' should be the finished weight divided by the yield, not the raw weight.
- Can I save a recipe and come back to it?
- Yes. Every edit is written to your browser's local storage under this page's key and restored when you return. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and clearing your browser data clears the recipe.
Keep going
- nutrition facts label generatorBuild the panel from a recipe: USDA nutrient data, 21 CFR 101.9 rounding, six formats, PNG, SVG and PDF.
- recipe nutrition calculatorPer-serving nutrition for a recipe, with the aggregation and the divide-by-servings step shown in full.
- food label generatorThe whole food label, not just the panel: ingredient statement, allergen statement and net quantity.
- serving size referenceAll 146 reference amounts customarily consumed from 21 CFR 101.12(b), the table that decides your serving size.