How to read an ingredient list
The nutrition panel tells you how much of something is in a food. The ingredient list tells you what that something is - and because it is ordered, its shape carries information before you have read a single name.
Published
Order is the information
Ingredients are listed in descending order of weight at the time of manufacture. The first three entries are usually most of the product. If a grain, a nut or a milk is first, that is the bulk of what you are buying; if sugar or a refined flour is first, the same is true of them.
This ordering is also what makes sugar splitting visible. A product can list sugar, glucose syrup and invert syrup separately, each of which then sits lower in the order than a single combined sugar entry would have. Reading the list for every sweetener rather than for the word "sugar" is the counter to this - and the added-sugars line on the panel gives you the combined total regardless.
Things worth recognising
- Compound ingredients are expanded in brackets. "Chocolate (sugar, cocoa butter, cocoa mass)" is one entry with its own internal order.
- Percentages appear where an ingredient is named or pictured on the front. A pack advertising almonds has to tell you how much almond is in it.
- Additives are named by function then identity - "emulsifier (soy lecithin)", "acidity regulator (INS 330)". The INS or E number is the identity, not a separate ingredient.
- Allergen declarations sit at the end, and are a legal requirement rather than a marketing choice.
- Oils are often declared as "edible vegetable oil" with the specific oil in brackets. If the specific oil matters to you, it will be there.
What a long list does and does not mean
A long ingredient list is a weak signal on its own. It usually means more processing steps, but a short list can still be a short list of things you would rather avoid, and a longer one can be a fortified product declaring its added vitamins individually.
Filtizy scores both: how many ingredients are named, and how many of them fall into flagged additive categories - artificial colours and flavours, preservatives, emulsifiers, stabilisers, artificial sweeteners, hydrogenated oil, high-fructose corn syrup, MSG and E-number additives. The second is weighted more heavily than the first, for the reason above. Both are set out in full on the methodology page.
A product that publishes no ingredient list at all is not a product with nothing to declare. Treat an empty list as missing information rather than as a clean one.
See it on real products
Every product page shows the same figures broken out, with the factor scores they produced.