Back-of-pack labelling without the headache: nutrition, ingredients & FIR

The back of the pack is small, fiddly, and unforgiving. Get the nutrition numbers wrong or miss an emphasised allergen and you're not looking at a typo — you're looking at a possible recall. Here's what UK law actually requires, and how to stop the label drifting out of step with the recipe.

What the FIR requires

UK food labelling follows the Food Information Regulations (the retained version of EU 1169/2011, usually shortened to FIR or FIC). For most pre-packed food it requires a defined set of information — and each part has rules that are easy to get subtly wrong.

• Nutrition declaration — energy (kJ and kcal), fat, saturates, carbohydrate, sugars, protein and salt, expressed per 100g or 100ml.
• Ingredients list — every ingredient in descending order of weight at the time of use, with compound ingredients broken down.
• Allergen emphasis — any of the 14 allergens present must be emphasised in the ingredients list (typically bold), not just listed.
• QUID — the percentage of an ingredient where it's named or pictured on the pack, or characterising of the product.
• The essentials — product name, net quantity, best-before / use-by, storage conditions, business name and address, and lot/batch identification.

Where labels go wrong

The recurring mistakes are rarely exotic:

• Allergens listed but not emphasised — a common and serious slip.
• Ingredients in the wrong order, or compound ingredients not broken out to reveal a hidden allergen.
• QUID missing where an ingredient is named or shown.
• Nutrition figures rounded or rolled up incorrectly, or not updated after a reformulation.
• "May contain" used as a catch-all instead of being justified by a real cross-contact risk.

Getting your nutrition figures right

Your declaration can be built from analysis or from calculation. Most small producers calculate: take the nutrient values for each raw material — from the supplier's specification, a Certificate of Analysis, or a reputable database — and combine them across the recipe to a per-100g figure, allowing for any losses in processing. The key is that the figures trace back to a defensible source, not a guess.

The bottom line

Good labelling isn't about memorising regulations — it's about making the back of pack a calculated output of the recipe rather than a hand-typed copy of it. Tie nutrition, ingredients and allergens to the live formulation, keep your source data defensible, and the label stops being the thing that quietly goes wrong between reformulations.