Ingredients list order: how it works

The rule

Heaviest first. Not most important, not most expensive, not the order you add them in the method.

“At the time of manufacture”

Weights are taken as they go in, not as they come out. A traybake loses water in the oven; the label describes what you put in the tin.

This catches people out in both directions. Sugar and butter routinely outweigh flour in a brownie, which surprises anyone who assumed flour leads because it is the “main” ingredient. And a soaked dried fruit weighs what it weighed when you added it, not after it plumps up.

Where compound ingredients sit

A compound ingredient takes its place by its own total weight. 200 g of chocolate is 200 g, however it divides between cocoa mass, sugar and cocoa butter inside the brackets.

Inside the brackets, its own ingredients are also in descending order — normally the order the supplier printed on the pack, which you should copy rather than rearrange.

Recipes you make by eye

Plenty of good food is made without a scale. The label still needs an order, and guessing is not a system. The pragmatic approach:

1. Weigh it once, properly. Make a batch the way you normally would, weighing each component as it goes in. One session produces a reference you can use for years.
2. Write those weights down as the recipe. Not as a constraint on how you cook — as the basis for the label.
3. Re-weigh when the method changes meaningfully. A different tin size or a doubled batch can move things around.

Water and small ingredients

• Added water is an ingredient and goes in by weight, with exemptions where it is under 5% of the finished product or is only reconstituting something.
• Salt, raising agents and flavourings are still ingredients however small. They go at the end, and they still get listed.
• Additives are named by function and then by name or E number — “emulsifier: soya lecithin”, “gelling agent: pectin”.

When you also need a percentage

A quantitative ingredient declaration — QUID — is required where an ingredient:

• appears in the name of the food (“strawberry jam”)
• is emphasised on the label with words, pictures or graphics (a photograph of raspberries)
• characterises the food and distinguishes it from similar products

Where it applies, the percentage goes next to that ingredient in the list. It is a separate requirement from allergen emphasis, and both can apply to the same ingredient at once.

Questions