Nutri-Score is a five-letter nutrition label (A to E) that grades food based on its nutritional quality per 100g. It was developed by French public health researchers and is now used officially in France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.

Is Nutri-Score used in the UK?

Not officially. The UK uses traffic light labels (red/amber/green per nutrient) rather than a single composite grade. Nutri-Score has been reviewed by UK authorities but has not been adopted nationally. However, many products sold in the UK — especially imported European brands — carry a Nutri-Score label.

Can Nutri-Score be misleading?

Yes, in some cases. Because it's calculated per 100g, foods eaten in small quantities (like olive oil or dark chocolate) can score worse than their typical serving size would suggest. It's also a within-category comparison tool — a Nutri-Score B chocolate isn't as nutritious as a Nutri-Score B vegetable, even though they share the same letter.

How is Nutri-Score calculated?

Nutri-Score uses a points system. Negative points are added for energy, saturated fat, total sugar, and sodium. Positive points are subtracted for protein, fibre, and fruit/vegetable/nut content. The final score determines the letter grade, from A (best) to E (worst).

Health

What Is Nutri-Score? The A to E Label Explained (And Why It Actually Matters)

Nutri-Score grades food from A to E. Here's how it works, what it misses, and why it's still one of the most useful shortcuts for comparing two products on a shelf.

1 April 2026

Walk into any supermarket in France, Germany, or Spain and you'll see a small coloured letter on the front of packaged food — a green A, a yellow C, a red E. That's Nutri-Score. It's a nutrition label that tries to do something genuinely useful: give you a single, at-a-glance signal about how good a food is for you.

Whether it succeeds is a more interesting question than you'd think.

Nutri-Score label showing the A to E colour scale on food packaging

What Nutri-Score actually is

Nutri-Score is a front-of-pack nutrition label that grades food on a five-point scale from A (best) to E (worst). Each letter gets a colour — dark green for A, light green for B, yellow for C, orange for D, red for E.

It was developed by a team of French public health researchers led by Serge Hercberg at Sorbonne Paris Nord University, based on the earlier Ofcom nutrition scoring model used by UK regulators. France adopted it as an official system in 2017. Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Luxembourg followed. The EU is currently working on making it mandatory across the bloc — though the timeline has been pushed back several times.

How the scoring works

The score is calculated per 100g of food (or per 100ml for drinks). It uses a points system that weighs bad things against good things.

Negative points (higher = worse):

Energy (kilojoules)
Saturated fat
Total sugar
Sodium

Positive points (higher = better):

Protein
Fibre
Fruit, vegetable, legume, nut content (as a percentage of ingredients)

The negative points are added up, then the positive points are subtracted. The resulting number maps to a letter: a low score is A or B, a high score is D or E. C sits in the middle.

The exact thresholds differ between food categories. Cheese, for example, has its own scale — otherwise almost every cheese in existence would score E, which isn't particularly useful. Drinks use a separate scoring system entirely, since beverages work differently from solid food.

Nutrition facts label — Nutri-Score converts these numbers into a single A to E grade

What it gets right

For comparing two similar products on a shelf, Nutri-Score is one of the better shortcuts available.

If you're standing in a supermarket looking at two pasta sauces and one scores B while the other scores D, that's useful information. One has a better nutrient profile — more fibre, less saturated fat, less sodium, or some combination of those. Without the label, you'd have to read both nutrition tables and do the maths yourself.

Nutri-Score also does something that raw nutrition information doesn't: it accounts for the interaction between nutrients. A food can have a lot of protein but also a lot of saturated fat. Nutri-Score reflects both, rather than letting one good thing hide a bad thing.

Studies have shown that Nutri-Score performs well as a predictor of dietary quality at a population level. People who eat more A and B foods tend to have better health outcomes than people who eat more D and E foods. That's not surprising, but it confirms the label is measuring something meaningful.

Comparing two similar products on a supermarket shelf — where Nutri-Score is most useful

What it gets wrong

Nutri-Score has some genuine limitations worth knowing about.

Olive oil scores poorly on Nutri-Score despite being a healthy fat — a known limitation of the per-100g calculation

It's a per-100g comparison, not a per-serving comparison. Olive oil scores D or E because it's 100% fat. But nobody eats 100g of olive oil in one sitting — a typical serving is 10–15g. The absolute contribution to your diet is small. The label can make olive oil look comparable to processed junk food, which isn't a fair comparison.

It only compares within categories, not across them. A Nutri-Score B chocolate bar and a Nutri-Score B apple both get the same letter. One is clearly better for you than the other. The label isn't designed to help you decide between chocolate and an apple — it's designed to help you choose between two chocolates.

It doesn't account for processing. A food made from highly processed industrial ingredients can score better than a minimally processed whole food if the macro profile happens to work out. This is why some researchers pair Nutri-Score with NOVA — a separate classification that looks at how processed a food is rather than what's in it. The two systems catch different problems.

Some foods are genuinely hard to classify. Fresh pressed juice is high in natural sugar and scores poorly despite coming from fruit. Nuts score D or E despite being one of the best snack choices available. The system was built for packaged grocery products and works best in that context.

Is it used in the UK?

Not officially. The UK left the EU before the Nutri-Score rollout gained momentum, and has its own front-of-pack traffic light system — separate red, amber, and green signals for each nutrient (fat, saturated fat, salt, sugar), rather than a single composite grade.

There's ongoing debate about which approach is better. Traffic lights give you more granular information but require you to interpret multiple signals at once. Nutri-Score is simpler — one letter — but loses nuance in the compression.

Some products sold in UK supermarkets carry Nutri-Score labels if they're imported from EU countries where the label is used. If you scan a product with the Food Nutrition Scanner and it comes back with a Nutri-Score grade, that data is pulled from Open Food Facts, which records the grade where the manufacturer has applied it.

How to use Nutri-Score practically

Using Nutri-Score as a quick filter when grocery shopping helps make better food choices

Use it as a quick filter, not a final verdict.

When you're choosing between two versions of the same type of food — two breakfast cereals, two yoghurts, two cooking sauces — Nutri-Score B over D is a meaningful difference. Go with the better grade.

When you're comparing very different foods, or foods eaten in small quantities, be sceptical. Olive oil scoring E doesn't mean you should avoid olive oil.

For fresh produce, Nutri-Score isn't relevant — it's a label system for packaged food. A banana or a chicken breast doesn't need a letter grade to tell you it's a decent food choice.

If you want to dig deeper into a specific product, the Food Nutrition Scanner lets you look up any food by name or barcode and see its Nutri-Score grade alongside the NOVA processing level, full macro breakdown, and a WorthIt verdict that combines both. Worth running your regular supermarket staples through it — some results are surprising.

Data sources: Open Food Facts (4.3M+ products), USDA FoodData Central (140,000+ foods). Nutri-Score methodology: Hercberg et al., European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.