ReciPal automatically produces compliant nutrition labels based on the recipes you enter. But what happens if you want to tweak the results of our database analysis? Our nutrition adjustment feature gives you the ability to easily override the calculated results in the rare cases where that's necessary.

Why would you want to adjust nutritional values?

Database analysis is a purely mathematical endeavor. It takes the known nutritional values of ingredients, calculates their contributions based on the amounts used, and aggregates all the information together - applying the proper formatting and rounding rules.

This process works great in the vast majority of cases, however, sometimes there's a good reason to make an adjustment. For instance, if you have lab results and you want to use those values over the calculated values for specific nutrients. Or, if you need to account for fat loss (e.g. rendering fat when cooking bacon).

There are a number of other processing steps which may alter the nutrient contents in a manner that is difficult to account for with a database analysis model:

• Boiling: Can lead to loss of water-soluble vitamins (like vitamin C and B vitamins)
• Frying: Can increase the fat content of foods and potentially destroy heat-sensitive nutrients
• Freezing: Can lead to some nutrient loss over long periods due to oxidation
• Fermentation: Can increase certain nutrients like B vitamins

Adding override functionality gives users more flexibility and control of the end results. ⚠️ Warning, nutrition adjustments are an advanced feature that should only be used when you are sure its application leads to a more accurate and transparent nutrition label.

Reducing the amount of vitamin C due to your knowledge of a processing step's effect is a great use case. Reducing the calories in your product just because you want it to be lower is a terrible use case and will lead to trouble down the road.

How it works

The nutrition adjustment functionality allows you to edit the results that our system calculates. These results include the calculation of calories, nutrients, and all vitamins/minerals.

From the Label page there is a section called “Nutrition adjustments”. When you expand it, you’ll see a list of all the components that you can adjust along with their current calculated values. Once you enter a value in the field, it will automatically override the calculated amount on the nutrition fact panel as well as within the nutrition breakdown and any connected recipes.

Rules and validations are in place to help make sure you are still producing compliant labels. For example, if you entered that your product had 143 calories, the nutrition fact panel would show 140 calories because it would apply the appropriate rounding rule to your edit. However, the nutrition breakdown would use the exact information you added as well as any other recipes using the formulation (in the case of sub-recipes). Similarly, there would be a warning message if you entered more saturated fats than total fats. However, despite trying to ensure accuracy, there’s no way to catch everything so when using this feature the onus is on the user.

It’s important to note that you can only adjust values that are present on the label. So, if you want to adjust the Vitamin C, you first need to select to show that as an optional vitamin. Another thing you should be aware of is that once you override a category it becomes locked, meaning future updates to the recipe won’t change this variable. So if you override the calories of a recipe, but then add a cup of sugar, you won’t see a change in calories since it will continue to pull from the adjusted value.

Our system will flag when a recipe is using overrides to make sure what’s going on is obvious to the user. You’ll see these notifications on the recipe page, the label page, and the nutrition breakdown.

If you ever want to return to the calculated values, you can choose to reset individual nutrients or reset everything at once.

Wrapping it up

Our nutrition adjustments functionality gives added flexibility to adjust the calculations of our platform. While this is a powerful tool, it should only be used when necessary and appropriate. Our goal, as always, is to give you easy-to-use tools to produce the most accurate labels.