Custom Nutrition, Adding Nutritional Information for Ingredients Not in the USDA database

Available in: Agile | Aware | Analyzer | Multi-Outlet

Why it's important

Nutritional information is vital for promoting public health, ensuring transparency in the food industry, supporting dietary needs, and educating consumers. By providing data like calorie counts, nutrient breakdowns, and portion sizes, it empowers individuals to make informed food choices tailored to their health goals, medical requirements, or personal preferences.

The USDA uses a standard 100-gram portion size for calculating nutrition to ensure consistency and ease of comparison across different foods. Since foods come in varying sizes and serving portions, this universal baseline allows consumers, dietitians, and researchers to accurately compare nutrient content, such as calories, vitamins, and minerals. It simplifies nutrition labeling and helps identify nutrient-dense or low-nutrient foods more effectively. This standardization promotes informed dietary choices and aids in meeting daily nutritional needs.

How to use it

For your recipe nutrition information and labels to be accurate each ingredient needs to have a nutritional component. YES! You can add custom nutrition codes. Just remember that the USDA calculates nutritional information using 100-gram portions.

1) From either the top "hamburger" menu or from the Dashboard, choose The Optimizer.

2) Choose the Custom Nutrition button

3) Click the green  button.

4) Add the item name and nutritional code. reciProfity will create a code number for this ingredient and use the nutritional information.

The USDA FoodData Central database contains the nutritional information for the USDA Global Branded Food Products Database (Branded Foods); nutritional info in this database is already in 100-gram portions. Copy those nutrient amounts into the reciProfity Custom Nutrition fields.

 

 If your ingredient is NOT in this database you can get the nutrients from the product's package label. Just remember that the USDA uses 100-gram portions for calculating nutritional information, so you must ensure that the information entered into the Custom Nutrition is per 100-gram serving portions.

5) Convert the nutrition facts to 100-grams portions.

** The goal of this exercise is to demonstrate how to convert nutrition facts into 100-gram portions and to ensure that the output of the serving recipe can be trusted.
** In the example below, I created an ingredient called "crispbread." I utilized the nutrition facts from the packaging to calculate the 100-gram portions in a custom nutrition code in reciProfity.
** Subsequently, I created a serving recipe that included only the box of crispbread as the ingredient and the nutrient facts output matched the original input, confirming that the calculations were correct.

The left panel of the image shows the nutrition information from the crispbread packaging, which provides details for a 33-gram serving. Since reciProfity requires the information to be in a 100-gram portion, we will perform some basic calculations to convert the 33-gram portion into a 100-gram portion.

Let's begin with the calories:  10 calories / 33 g * 100 = 30 calories.
For sodium:  250 mg / 33 g * 100 = 757 mg.
For carbohydrates:  2 g / 33 g * 100 = 6.06 g, and so on.

The middle panel displays the completed 100-gram portion data that we created in reciProfity, while the right panel is the nutrition output from reciProfity's serving recipe for a box of crispbread. The output from reciProfity matches the data shown on the Nutrition Facts of the packaging label, confirming that the calculations are correct.

6) Open the ingredient in edit mode, then scroll to the Nutrient Codes field in the left sidebar. Start typing the name of the Custom Nutrition code, such as "crispbread."

The custom nutrient codes are identified with a green icon, while the USDA codes are marked with an orange icon.