FSSAI requires ingredients in descending order of weight. If sugar, palm oil or maida sits in the first three positions, that is what you are mostly buying, whatever the front of the pack celebrates. Everything after the fifth position is seasoning.

Nutrition tables state values per 100 g/ml, per serving, or both. Serving sizes are chosen by the brand — a 30 g "serving" of chips from a 90 g pocket pack makes every number look one-third of its real size. Per-100 is the only basis on which two products can be compared, which is why Falose stores and scores nothing else.

Sucrose, glucose, fructose, invert syrup, corn syrup, maltodextrin, fruit concentrate, honey, jaggery — all free sugars. Splitting sugar across several names pushes each one down the ingredient order, so "sugar" can appear fourth in a product that is one-third sugar by weight. The total sugar line in the nutrition table is the honest number.

Labels state sodium in mg; the salt you'd measure in a spoon is 2.5× that. 800 mg of sodium per 100 g — ordinary for namkeen — is 2 g of salt in every 100 g, against a WHO full-day ceiling of 5 g.

"High in calcium!", "with real fruit!", "baked not fried!" are claims designed around what regulation permits. The nutrition table and ingredient list on the back are what FSSAI actually audits. When the two disagree in spirit, the back is telling the truth. Falose's marketing score checks exactly this gap.

India labels additives as INS numbers (the international system; E-numbers are the same codes as used in Europe). INS 330 is citric acid from citrus; INS 102 is tartrazine, which EU law requires a child-attention warning for. The number tells you what it is — our encyclopedia tells you what is documented about it.

Allergen lines like "may contain traces of nuts" declare shared production lines. Separately, FSSAI requires the veg/non-veg mark — the green or brown dot — on every pack; some additives (E120 carmine, from insects; E631 sometimes from fish) make a product non-vegetarian in ways the ingredient names do not reveal.

Every product in our catalogue is normalised to per-100, checked against physical-plausibility rules (a biscuit cannot have 45 kcal/100 g — we quarantine data that fails), scored on the published formula, and shown with its full ingredient and additive breakdown. The label still deserves your two minutes in the aisle; we handle the arithmetic.