How to read an ingredient label in a language you don't speak

You do not need to read Turkish to check a Turkish biscuit packet. You need to recognise four or five words in it, know roughly where on the label they should appear, and know which of your usual habits stop working at the border. That is a much smaller job than learning a language, and it is worth doing before you leave rather than in the aisle.

Learn the words, not the language

Pick your allergens and learn the local word for each one. Not the phrase, not the sentence — the word, in the local script, as it is printed. Write them down somewhere you can reach without a signal: a note on your phone, and a slip of paper in your wallet in case the phone is flat.

Two details make the difference between a list that works and one that does not. First, learn the plural and the adjective as well as the noun, because that is what packaging actually uses. Second, learn the words for the forms your allergen arrives in, which are often not derived from its name at all. Someone avoiding wheat needs the local words for flour and semolina — maida, sooji, semola, irmik, Grieß — more than the word for wheat, because those are what appear on the pack. Our wheat and gluten guide lists them, and every other allergen guide carries the same table for its own allergen.

Aliases travel badly, too. Arachide and cacahuète are both French for peanut, and the peanut guide covers why groundnut and arachis belong on your list as well.

Bold text is a European habit, not a universal one

In the EU and the UK, the Food Information to Consumers regulation — Reg. (EU) No 1169/2011 — names fourteen allergens in Annex II and, in Article 21, requires each of them to be emphasised inside the ingredient list so that it clearly stands out from everything around it. The regulation suggests font, style or background colour as ways of doing that. Bold is simply the most popular way of complying, not the letter of the law, so you will also meet capitals, underlining, italics and coloured highlights.

What matters is what that habit does to your reading. Scanning a European label for the one heavy word in a sea of light ones is a genuinely fast technique, and it is a technique that quietly fails the moment you leave the regime that created it. Plenty of countries have no emphasis rule at all: your allergen sits mid-list, in the same weight and size as the sugar and the salt, and a visual sweep will miss it. The United States has no emphasis requirement either, but it compensates with a different rule — under FALCPA the plain English name of a major allergen must appear, either inside the list or in a “Contains” statement beneath it, and the FASTER Act added sesame to those majors with effect from 1 January 2023. So a US label is easy to read once you find the Contains line, and an EU label is easy to skim, and a label from somewhere with neither convention needs reading word by word.

Know where to look before you look

Labels are more standardised in structure than in wording. The ingredient list is almost always introduced by a local word meaning “ingredients” — learn that one too, because it tells you which paragraph on the back of the pack to read. Ingredients are listed in descending order of weight in the EU, the UK and the US, so an allergen near the front is a main ingredient and one at the end is a flavouring, a carrier or an additive.

Under the EU and UK rules the allergen information lives in the ingredient list itself: there is no separate mandatory allergen box, and any “may contain” line below the list is voluntary. The exception is the handful of packs that are allowed no ingredient list at all — some drinks, single-ingredient foods — where the allergen must instead be named in a “contains” statement. Elsewhere you may find a summary declaration in a box, or after the list, or nowhere. Two more things are worth knowing about imported packets. A translated sticker applied over the original label is common, and it is sometimes a shorter list than the one underneath it — peel a corner and read the original as well. And a claim on the front of the pack is marketing; the list on the back is the legal text.

E-numbers are the part of the list that travels

The additive numbering used across the EU is language-independent. E322 is E322 in Greek, Finnish and Hungarian, and much of the rest of the world uses the same numbers without the E prefix. That gives you one section of a foreign list you can parse without any vocabulary at all.

Be clear about what the number tells you, though. It identifies the additive; it does not identify what the additive was made from. E322 is lecithins, and lecithin is very often soya. In the EU and the UK the allergenic source has to be named, so the list reads soya lecithins and the emphasis rule catches the word soya. On a packet from a country with no such requirement, the number can stand alone with no mention of soya anywhere. Treat a bare number as a question rather than an answer.

Photograph the label, then read it properly

Take a photo of the whole ingredient panel before you decide anything — the single most useful habit in a foreign supermarket. It lets you read the small print zoomed in rather than squinting at a curved foil pouch, it gives you something to show a hotel receptionist or a pharmacist later, and it leaves you a record of exactly which product you ate. Photograph the barcode in the same shot so the product can be looked up again.

The most dangerous label is the one that is not there

Everything above assumes an ingredient list exists. The genuinely hard cases are the ones where it does not: the bakery tray, the deli counter, the market stall, the pick-and-mix, the refilled bulk bin, the bread roll in a paper bag. There is no list to read, no emphasis to scan and no additive number to recognise.

The EU and UK rules do require allergen information for food sold loose, but they allow it to be given by other means than a label, including verbally where a notice tells you to ask. That is a weaker position to be in, in a language you do not speak. The UK narrowed one part of this in October 2021: food packed on the premises where it is sold — prepacked for direct sale — now has to carry a full ingredient list with the allergens emphasised, which is why the sandwich in the chiller cabinet has a proper label and the one made to order does not.

Where there is no list, the honest answer is that you do not know, and “I do not know” deserves the same caution as a warning. Deciding that in advance is easier than deciding it while hungry in front of a bakery.

Where a scanner helps

This is the job PNut does. Photograph the ingredient panel and it reads the text off the label in any of 40+ languages, checks it against the allergens you selected, and returns one of four verdicts — Safe, Contains allergen, May contain, or Unknown. Or scan the barcode and it looks the product up instead. How it works walks through both routes. The Unknown verdict is the one that matters most here: when the label cannot be read, or there is no list at all, it says so rather than guessing.