How to read food labels in the Netherlands — an evidence-based guide.
If you have moved here recently, you have probably had the aisle moment. You are standing in Albert Heijn holding a tub of yoghurt, turning it over hoping the back is in English, and it is not. There is a coloured letter on the front that everyone else seems to understand, an ingredients list in a language you are still learning, and a table of numbers referring to an amount you are not going to eat. You have fed yourself competently for decades, and a dairy product has defeated you.
For deeper context, see: What to Eat Before, During, and After Your Workout (No Bro-Science, Promise).
I want to say plainly that how to read food labels in the Netherlands is not a knowledge gap in you. It is a design problem in the label, which has to satisfy regulators and persuade shoppers at once — so the honest information sits in small print on the back and the reassuring information in large friendly type on the front. Once you know where to look, this takes about fifteen seconds per product. One thing first, because I say it to every client who asks about labels: this is a tool for information. It is not a system for supervising yourself, and I return to that near the end.
The Voedingswaarde Table, and the Per 100 Gram Trap
Voedingswaarde means nutritional value, and it is the panel on the back of the package. Here, as across the EU, the anchor column is per 100 grams for solids and per 100 millilitres for liquids. Reading down: energie in kilojoules then kilocalories, vetten with waarvan verzadigde vetzuren indented beneath, koolhydraten with waarvan suikers beneath that, sometimes vezels, then eiwitten, then zout. The indented lines are subsets — sugars sit inside the carbohydrates, saturated fat inside the total fat — and people add them together and frighten themselves.
That per 100 gram column lets you compare two products honestly: two jars of pasta sauce in different-sized jars, two cereals, two brands of hummus. Nothing else on the package does that. For a whole-food reference, our food search tool is quicker than squinting at a second jar.
The trap is the column beside it. Many packages add a per portie column, and the manufacturer chose that portion. Nutrition science had no say in it, and neither did you. Some packages also show reference intake percentages, marked referentie-inname or RI, expressing a nutrient as a share of an average adult's day — a statistical construction, almost certainly not you. [TK: confirm range] Compare per 100 grams, and if the portion column disagrees with your bowl, trust your bowl.
The Ingredients List Is the Most Useful Part of the Whole Label
If I could persuade you to look at one thing on Dutch packaging and ignore the rest, it would be the ingrediënten list. It tells you what the food is. The numbers only tell you what the food contains.
Ingredients appear in descending order by weight, so the first three or four items are most of what you are eating. A strawberry yoghurt beginning with yoghurt, sugar, then strawberries is a different product from one beginning with yoghurt, strawberries, then sugar — and no coloured letter on the front will tell you that. It is the fastest quality signal you have, and it works in any language.
Length is informative too, though not as a moral test: a very long list, heavy with ingredients that exist to make a food shelf-stable, emulsified or intensely palatable, tells you that you are holding something highly manufactured, which I cover in this guide to ultra-processed foods. Allergens are helpfully highlighted in bold or capitals, so tarwe, melk, soja, noten and ei jump out even if the rest of the list defeats you.
Nutri-Score: What It Tells You, and What It Does Not
Older Dutch packaging carried the Vinkje, a small tick logo meant to mark the better choice. It left behind a habit that outlived the logo: treating a mark on the front of a box as a verdict. Nutri-Score gets read the same way.
Conceptually, Nutri-Score assesses a product per 100 grams and produces one letter with a colour. The algorithm gives credit for components associated with better dietary patterns — fibre, protein, and the fruit, vegetable, legume and nut content — and applies penalties for energy, sugars, saturated fat and salt. It has been revised since the scheme was introduced, which matters if you compare an older package with a newer one. I am deliberately not quoting thresholds or cut-off values, because those are the details that shift. [TK: confirm current status of Nutri-Score in the Netherlands before publishing]
Now the part most people are not told. Nutri-Score compares products within a category; it cannot tell you whether a food deserves a place in your life. It answers "which of these two cereals is better composed", and not "should I eat cereal". Scoring everything per 100 grams also produces odd results at the edges, where foods eaten in small quantities — oils, nuts, some traditional products — sit awkwardly against an energy penalty. Use it as a shelf-level shortcut: a comparison tool, not a moral grade.
Suikers, Zout and Vezels: Three Lines Worth a Second Look
The waarvan suikers line is the one clients ask about most and the one most often misread. It counts all sugars present, whether from added sugar, from the lactose in milk, or from fruit — so plain yoghurt still shows sugars. The panel cannot separate added from inherent, and the ingredients list can. Added sugars carry many Dutch names: suiker, glucosestroop, glucose-fructosestroop, dextrose, invertsuikerstroop, maltodextrine, honing, agavesiroop, vruchtenconcentraat. Noticing three or four in one list is the useful skill, because that is often how a sweet food keeps sugar out of the top positions.
Salt appears on Dutch and EU packaging as zout, while older packages, imports and most American labels give natrium, sodium. These are different numbers converted by a fixed factor, so sodium always looks smaller for the identical food and the two cannot be compared directly. [TK: confirm range] The biggest weekly contributors for most people are bread, cheese, cured meats, sauces and ready meals.
Vezels is fibre, and the most underused line on the panel. It is missing from many packages, because manufacturers are not obliged to print it, and it tends to appear when it flatters the product. Where it is printed, it is one of the best indicators of whether a bread or a cereal is doing much for you, and most people get less fibre than would serve them well. [TK: confirm range]
A Short Dutch Label Glossary for Newcomers
The words that do the real work on a Dutch package:
- Voedingswaarde — nutritional value; the panel itself.
- Ingrediënten — ingredients, in descending order by weight.
- Energie — energy, in kJ then kcal. Eiwitten — protein.
- Vetten / waarvan verzadigde vetzuren — fat, of which saturates.
- Koolhydraten / waarvan suikers — carbohydrate, of which sugars.
- Vezels — fibre; optional, and often the most telling line.
- Zout — salt. Natrium is sodium, a different figure.
- Per portie / per verpakking — per portion, per package; the manufacturer sets it.
- Bevat — contains. Kan sporen bevatten van — may contain traces of.
- Volkoren — wholegrain, a meaningful term. Meergranen — multigrain, meaning only that several grains were used. Bruin brood — brown bread, a colour.
- Zonder toegevoegde suikers — no added sugars, which is not the same as no sugar.
- Mager / halfvol / vol — low fat, semi, full fat, usually on dairy.
- Ten minste houdbaar tot (THT) — best before, a quality date. Te gebruiken tot (TGT) — use by, a safety date.
- Biologisch — organic; a farming standard, which says nothing about nutrition.
A Supermarket Trip, Label by Label
Here is how this looks on an ordinary shop. No figures, because recipes change and the method is what transfers.
- A tub of yoghurt. On the fruit version, find where sugar sits relative to the fruit in the ingredients. Then notice that the plain tub beside it also shows sugars, because of lactose. Ten seconds, and you know why the panel alone would have misled you.
- A loaf of bread. Ignore the crust colour and the rustic packaging. Look for volkoren rather than meergranen or bruin, then see whether vezels is printed and compare it with the loaf beside it. Bread is where a fibre decision quietly pays off.
- A jar of pasta sauce. Compare two jars per 100 grams for zout and waarvan suikers, then read the first three ingredients. One begins with tomatoes; one begins with water and tomato purée. That difference is the whole story, and often not in the price.
- A breakfast cereal. The front may say vezelrijk or volkoren, claims worth checking rather than accepting. Turn it over, read what the manufacturer called a portion, then think honestly about your bowl.
- A ready meal. Check whether the figures are per portie or per verpakking, and whether the package claims one portion or two. Then read zout per 100 grams against the meal beside it.
Notice that every decision there came from the ingredients list and the per 100 gram column, and none of it needed arithmetic or an app. Notice too that not one step ended with putting a food back because it was forbidden — the whole exercise was choosing between two real options, which is what shopping is. The same habits hold when cost is the constraint: I have written separately about eating well on a budget and healthy shopping in Dutch supermarkets.
When Label Reading Starts Running Your Life
I want to be honest about the other direction this can go, because I see it regularly and it rarely gets mentioned in articles like this one. For some people, label reading stops being a fifteen-second habit and becomes a compulsion — standing in an aisle unable to choose, photographing packaging to check later, refusing food at someone else's table. If that is familiar, please hear this clearly: the label is information, not surveillance. You are allowed to put the tool down.
There are situations where you should read labels more deliberately, and every one of them is medical: a diagnosed food allergy or coeliac disease, kidney disease with a prescribed sodium limit, medication with a food interaction. There the label is a clinical instrument, and your doctor or dietitian will tell you which line to read. Nutrition support works alongside that care and never replaces it. For everyone else, if reading a label leaves you feeling informed, keep going. If it leaves you feeling watched, talk to someone rather than reading harder.
Common Food Label Myths
"If it has a good Nutri-Score, it is a healthy food."
Nutri-Score compares products within a category and does not judge whether that category belongs in your diet. A well-scoring version of a highly manufactured food is still highly manufactured, and a food scoring less well can be a reasonable part of your week.
"Zonder toegevoegde suikers means there is no sugar in it."
It means no sugar was added during manufacture. The product can still contain a good deal of sugar from fruit, fruit concentrate, juice or milk, and the panel will show it. Read the waarvan suikers line together with the ingredients list.
"If I cannot pronounce an ingredient, it is bad for me."
An appealing rule and an unreliable one. Ascorbic acid is vitamin C and citric acid is in every lemon, while sugar, salt and palm oil are all easy to say. A long list does tell you a food is highly manufactured, which is genuinely useful, but the length of a word is not evidence about anything.
"Reading labels properly means checking everything I buy, every time."
You only need to read a product the first time. Once you have settled on your bread, your yoghurt and your pasta sauce, those decisions hold for months. Label reading is meant to shrink over time, not expand.
Working With Hanzi Nutrition
I am a dietitian, and I do not think the problem for people who move here is that they know too little about food. It is that they are rebuilding an entire eating pattern in an unfamiliar shop, in a second language, while being sold certainty by a coloured letter on a box.
At Hanzi Nutrition, I work fully online with clients across the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Turkey, in both English and Turkish. We begin with a first consultation covering how you are eating now, what you can buy near you, your budget, your kitchen, your culture and your schedule, without judgement. From there I build a personalised plan around real products you can find in a Dutch supermarket and in the Turkish or international shops you already use, so that you are not translating a plan into a shop every week. If there is a medical reason to be reading a particular line — an allergy, coeliac disease, blood pressure, kidney function — I flag it and coordinate with your doctor. You can start with healthy lifestyle counselling or get your custom plan.
If Dutch supermarkets still feel like an exam you did not revise for, and you want a calm, practical way to shop and eat here, book a consultation with me today.
Hanzi Nutrition offers dietitian-led nutrition counselling across the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Turkey, fully online, in English and Turkish. This article is general education and not a substitute for individual medical care. If you have a food allergy, coeliac disease, or a prescribed sodium or potassium limit, please read labels according to your own doctor or dietitian.
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