Food Label Symbols

What counts as a label symbol

These marks are printed on the face of the label: nutrition summaries, grades, date codes, origin marks and the small legal marks beside the quantity. Marks describing the container itself belong to food container symbols and food packaging symbols.

Front-of-pack nutrition marks

A front-of-pack mark summarizes the panel on the back. Most are voluntary, and each scheme scores by its own rules, so two schemes are not comparable.

• Traffic lights — red, amber and green bands for fat, saturates, sugars and salt, used in the UK. Color follows fixed thresholds per 100 g or 100 ml; the number inside is usually per portion.
• Reference intake (%RI) — the percentages next to energy and nutrients. RI is a benchmark for an average adult, not a personal target.
• Nutri-Score — a five-step scale from A on dark green to E on dark orange. It ranks a food against comparable foods, so an A on a cereal shelf and an A on a pizza shelf do not mean the same thing.
• Health Star Rating — half a star to five, in half-star steps, used in Australia and New Zealand.
• Black warning marks — the octagon and stop-sign shapes used in Chile, Mexico, Peru and elsewhere to declare a product high in sugar, salt, saturated fat or calories. Mandatory where they apply, which makes them the exception here.

Date marks and batch codes

• Use by is a safety instruction, printed on food that can become unsafe without looking or smelling wrong.
• Best before is a quality statement. Past it, food may be stale, not automatically unsafe. On long-life goods it is often written best before end with only a month and year.
• Lot or batch code — often an L and digits, ink-jetted on a seam. It names a production run so a recall can identify it. It is not a date.

Quantity, origin and the small legal marks

• The estimated sign — a lowercase e in a specific drawn form beside the net quantity, stating the pack was filled under an average-quantity system with a permitted tolerance. A defined printed mark, not a letter you type.
• Health or identification oval — on meat, fish and dairy, holding a country code, an approval number and a short region abbreviation. It identifies the plant that packed the food, not where the ingredients came from.
• Barcodes — usually EAN-13 or UPC-A. The leading digits are a prefix assigned to the organization that issued the number, so they say where the company registered, not where the food was made. That is the most repeated myth about a food label.
• Serving icons — a spoon, a glass or a small pack outline showing one serving. The manufacturer picks the serving, and two brands of the same product often pick differently.

None of this can be copied as text

Every mark above is artwork or a glyph from a private label font. No Unicode character exists for a traffic-light band, a Nutri-Score grade or a use-by mark, so nothing here pastes into a message. The food characters that do exist are on food symbols to copy and paste. For marks certifying how a food was made, see healthy food symbols and food brand symbols.