Forcing QUID Values to 100%: Why is this Practice Incorrect?
- July 3, 2023
- 1:59 pm
When using NutriCalc to obtain QUID (Quantitative Ingredient Declaration) values for your ingredient listing, you may sometimes see a message offering to force the total of the QUID values to 100%. But it is stated that this is not recommended. This only occurs with cooked recipes.
Your recipe will start its life with a list of ingredients totalling 100%. But, after cooking, the % of ingredient within the product will increase although we appreciate that this does seem strange. As some users are not comfortable with this, here is the explanation.
Take this example. A sponge cake made with four ingredients: flour, sugar, eggs and butter each being equal in quantity at 25g of product prior to cooking.
Let’s say the cooking process loses moisture so that the weight goes down from 100g to 90g. So what was 100g of product now becomes 90g.
This means that the quantity of each ingredient is no longer 25g out of 100g (or 25%), but rather is now 25g out of 90g (or 27.7%).
So overall the percentages of each ingredient are now higher than prior to the cooking process. In fact, the total of all the QUIDs in the ingredient declaration comes to 111%.
The Food Information Regulation (Annex VIII 4a) states that QUID values must be calculated for the cooked product, not the uncooked, so this procedure is as legally required.
The reasons that NutriCalc offers the option to force the QUID percentages to 100%, even though it seems wrong, are
a) for users whose customer insists upon it
b) where the total of the QUID values that actually appear on the label total more than 100%, the uncooked values need to be used (as stated in the above Regulation).
If you have any questions about QUIDding, please contact NutriCalc Support.
Or read our other paper on this subject: To QUID and What to QUID, That is the Question!
- For more information on nutrition calculation, reformulation and labelling, please see our other papers
- Email: helpdesk@nutricalc.co.uk
- Or call us: 01598 760673
