India, UK, or EU — which food nutrition standard should you trust?
"High in sugar" doesn't mean the same thing everywhere. Three major regions define it three different ways — and none of them is simply wrong.
UK: the FSA traffic-light system
The UK Food Standards Agency's front-of-pack scheme is the one most UK shoppers already recognise — red, amber, and green bands for sugar, saturated fat, and salt, based on fixed gram amounts per 100g (or per 100ml for drinks). It's simple and consistent: a product either crosses a line or it doesn't, regardless of what else is in it.
India: ICMR-NIN's HFSS definition
India doesn't have a voluntary label scheme in the same visual style. Instead, the Indian Council of Medical Research's National Institute of Nutrition defines "High in Fat, Sugar, or Salt" (HFSS) — the standard FSSAI has said it will adopt for future labelling — using a different method for sugar and saturated fat: instead of a flat gram cutoff, it looks at what percentage of a product's total energy comes from sugar or saturated fat (over 10% of energy from either counts as "high"). Salt keeps a flat cutoff, at 625mg per 100g.
The practical effect: a product's energy density changes the verdict. A very low-calorie product can cross the "high sugar" line with a fairly small gram amount, because that small amount still makes up a large share of its (small) total energy — something a flat gram-based system like the UK's wouldn't flag the same way.
EU: Nutri-Score
The EU's widely-adopted standard, Nutri-Score, is different in kind from both of the above — not a set of pass/fail cutoffs per nutrient, but a single points formula. It weighs sugar, saturated fat, salt, and energy against fibre, protein, and fruit/vegetable/nut content, and reduces the whole thing to one letter grade, A to E. Because it's one number covering several nutrients at once, it can average away a problem in one specific nutrient if the product scores well enough elsewhere — see our Nutri-Score deep dive for more on that trade-off.
What about the US and everywhere else?
The US doesn't use a pass/fail or letter-grade front-of-pack scheme at all — the FDA's Nutrition Facts label instead lists %DV (Daily Value) for each nutrient, leaving the "is this high or low" judgement to the shopper rather than a label design. Countries outside these four systems mostly borrow from one of them, adapt WHO regional guidance, or don't yet mandate a standardised front-of-pack scheme. There's no single global definition of "healthy" — which is really the point of this whole piece.
So which one is "right"?
None of them, universally. Each was designed around a different public-health priority and a different food supply — the UK's bands assume a certain reference diet, India's percent-of-energy method is built specifically around the fact that added sugar and fat are the target regardless of a product's overall energy density, and the EU's points system is built for at-a-glance comparison on a shelf. Using the "wrong" one for your context doesn't give you a wrong answer exactly — it gives you a different, equally valid answer to a subtly different question.
Why this matters for personalisation
This is the reason Olive Avocado lets you choose which standard scores your scans, rather than picking one and applying it globally: India (ICMR-NIN/FSSAI), UK (FSA), or EU (Nutri-Score), switchable any time in Settings. Whichever you pick drives both the personalised score and the "why" behind it — so the verdict on your screen matches the definition of "healthy" that's actually relevant to where you shop.