If you've searched a product on our packaged food lookup, you've seen a colored badge from A (dark green) to E (dark red). That's Nutri-Score — a French front-of-pack labeling system now used across most of Europe. It's on Open Food Facts, on grocery products in France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland, and increasingly on international brands that want the European market.
It's useful. It's also frequently misleading. Here's what it's actually measuring, what it isn't, and how to read it without falling into its traps.
How Nutri-Score is calculated
Behind the letter is a simple points system. Every 100 grams of a product gets:
Negative points (worse score) for:
- Calories (energy)
- Saturated fat
- Sugars
- Sodium
Positive points (better score) for:
- Fiber
- Protein
- Fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts (calculated as a percentage of the product)
You subtract the positive points from the negative points, and where the total lands on a scale determines the letter grade. A = 0 or fewer points. E = 19 or more.
Different rules for beverages, cheese, and added fats — but the logic is the same.
What Nutri-Score gets right
A lot, actually. It's designed to be quick to read at a supermarket shelf, and it correctly steers you away from products with high sugar, high sodium, and low fiber. A frosted breakfast cereal will consistently score D or E. A whole-grain unsweetened cereal will consistently score A or B. That's the right signal.
It also gives credit for fiber and protein, which most simpler labeling systems ignore. Two products with the same calorie count can score very differently based on what those calories are made of.
And it's evidence-based. The formula was developed by public-health researchers, tested against national nutrition surveys, and updated in 2023 based on results from real-world consumer behavior studies.
Where it goes wrong
1. Portion sizes are irrelevant to the score
Nutri-Score is per 100g. That works for cereal (a serving is roughly 40g, so you can eyeball the math). It stops working for things you eat in very small or very large quantities — hot sauce, olive oil, salad dressing on one side, cornflakes on the other.
Extra-virgin olive oil scores C — because it's calorically dense and mostly fat. But olive oil is one of the most well-studied healthy foods in the modern diet. The problem isn't olive oil. The problem is that Nutri-Score can't distinguish between "you'll eat 100 grams of this in a sitting" (cereal) and "you'll eat 15 grams of this per week" (olive oil).
2. Ultra-processed foods can score well
Nutri-Score doesn't measure processing level — only nutrient content. A protein bar engineered to be high in fiber, high in protein, low in saturated fat and sugar can score an A. It might also contain 15 ingredients, most of them refined and stabilized to survive a supply chain. That's why Open Food Facts also shows a separate NOVA group (1–4) for processing level — and reading both together is much more informative than either alone.
3. It treats all "fruits and vegetables" as equal
A juice concentrate counts toward the fruits/vegetables percentage. So does whole broccoli. The score doesn't distinguish.
4. Diet-specific concerns are invisible
Nutri-Score doesn't consider gluten, dairy, added colors, artificial sweeteners, or allergens. A "healthy" candy sweetened with aspartame scores well. If you're avoiding sweeteners for personal reasons, the letter doesn't help you.
The right way to read it
- Use it as a first-pass filter. A green A is almost always better than a red E in the same category (cereals to cereals, yogurts to yogurts).
- Never compare across categories. A B-scoring pizza and a C-scoring olive oil aren't comparable foods.
- Cross-reference with NOVA group. A "healthy" score with a NOVA 4 (ultra-processed) is a flag to look at the ingredient list.
- Check the actual macros. The score compresses six things into one letter. If sodium matters to you, look at sodium directly.
The bottom line
Nutri-Score is a useful shortcut, not a nutritional truth. Use it to compare like-for-like on a supermarket shelf, ignore it when comparing categories, and always glance at the actual macros and ingredient list before making a call.
You can look up Nutri-Score for any packaged food on our packaged food page. Data comes from Open Food Facts, the open-source community food database — see /sources for full attribution.