Why it's important
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) uses a standard 100-gram portion size for calculating nutrition facts to ensure consistency and ease of comparison across different foods. Because 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
It all begins with the product packaging information of the ingredients. Each ingredient must include Pack Size details so reciProfity understands how it is purchased. Because the USDA standardizes nutrition facts data into 100-gram portions, the ingredient must provide weight in the Pack Size or at least one volume-to-weight conversion. The weight information does not need to be specified in grams because reciProfity will calculate the nutrient facts based on the ingredient's volume-to-weight conversion.
How to convert the nutrition facts to 100-gram 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 (1st image) to calculate the 100-gram portions in a custom nutrition code (2nd image) in reciProfity.
- Subsequently, I created a serving recipe that included only the box of crispbread as the ingredient and the nutrient facts output (3rd image) matched the original input, confirming that the calculations were correct.
The first image below shows the nutrition information from the crispbread packaging, which provides details for a 33-gram serving. Because reciProfity requires the nutrition facts to be in a 100-gram portion, we will perform some basic calculations to convert the 33-gram serving 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 second image displays the completed 100-gram portion data that we created in reciProfity, while the third image is the nutrition facts from reciProfity's serving recipe for a box of crispbread. The nutrition facts from reciProfity match the data shown on the nutrition facts of the packaging label, confirming that the calculations are correct.
** You can also use a percentage of an ingredient in a recipe, such as a brine.
In addition, you can add nutrition to a Prep recipe.