How to Read a Seasoning Label, Line by Line

A US seasoning label answers four questions, if you know where to look. Ingredients are listed by weight, heaviest first, but no percentages are required. The serving size for a seasoning salt is fixed by regulation at a quarter-teaspoon, so divide the sodium by the grams in that serving: pure salt carries about 393 mg of sodium per gram, and the ratio tells you roughly how much of the jar is salt. “Spices” and “natural flavor” are lawful collective names, and the allergen statement covers nine foods only — though it reaches inside the flavourings.

What does the order of ingredients tell you?

Rank, not ratio. The regulation, 21 CFR 101.4(a)(1), requires ingredients to be listed “in descending order of predominance by weight.” FDA’s own Food Labeling Guide puts it as plainly as it can be put: the ingredient that weighs the most comes first and the one that weighs the least comes last.

That is all it requires. A blend that is ninety per cent salt and one that is forty per cent salt can both begin with the word salt. Nothing in the list says how far the first ingredient is ahead of the second.

There is also a trapdoor at the end. Under 101.4(a)(2), ingredients present at 2 per cent or less by weight can be gathered after a phrase such as “contains 2% or less of” and listed in any order. In a seasoning, that tail is usually where the flavourings, the anti-caking agent and the colour live. Order inside it means nothing at all.

Why is the serving size a quarter-teaspoon?

Because the regulation says so. FDA’s table of reference amounts customarily consumed — the RACC, in 21 CFR 101.12 — sets 1/4 tsp for “salt, salt substitutes, seasoning salts,” and 1/4 tsp or 0.5 g for spices and herbs. A dry seasoning mix, such as a taco packet, is treated differently: its reference amount is whatever it takes to make one serving of the finished dish.

So the quarter-teaspoon is a regulatory unit, not a portion anybody measured at a stove. It has two consequences for what you read.

• Small servings trigger rounding. Under 21 CFR 101.9(c)(4), sodium below 5 mg is declared as zero; from 5 to 140 mg it is rounded to the nearest 5; above 140 to the nearest 10. Fat, carbohydrate and protein in a one-gram serving round to zero almost automatically, which is why a seasoning panel is a column of zeros with one real number in it.
• The per-serving figure looks modest. European labels give nutrition per 100 g, which makes a seasoning look like what it is. The US panel does not, so you do the division yourself.

The one sum worth doing

Sodium chloride is 39.3 per cent sodium by weight, so one gram of pure salt carries about 393 mg of sodium. That is chemistry, not a label figure, and as our sodium-by-salt-type piece shows, it barely moves between table salt, sea salt and flake.

Divide the declared sodium by the serving weight in grams, then divide by 393. The answer is roughly the fraction of the jar that is salt. Garlic, onion and pepper carry a little sodium of their own, but in amounts that vanish inside the rounding, so the result is a close estimate rather than an exact one.

The same arithmetic is how a smoke-flavoured salt gives itself away: carriers and flow agents take up weight and bring no sodium with them.

A worked example: Montreal Steak Seasoning

McCormick’s Grill Mates Montreal Steak Seasoning is a mass-market American blend whose maker publishes both panels on its own product page. For the 3.4 oz jar the ingredient list reads:

Coarse Salt, Spices (Including Black Pepper and Red Pepper), Garlic, Onion, Sunflower Oil, Natural Flavor and Extractives of Paprika.

The nutrition panel shown on the same page gives 96 servings, serving size 1/4 tsp (1 g), sodium 250 mg (11% DV), and zero for calories, fat, carbohydrate and protein. Read line by line:

Now the part the panel cannot show. The same page says: “Shake 1 tbsp of seasoning per 1 lb of beef, pork, or seafood before grilling or broiling.” A tablespoon is twelve quarter-teaspoons. At the label’s own figure of one gram per quarter-teaspoon, that is about 12 g of seasoning and about 3,000 mg of sodium on a pound of beef, pork or seafood, from a jar whose panel says 250. Neither number is wrong. They answer different questions, and only one of them is printed in the box.

McCormick also sells a version labelled 25% less sodium than the original. Its list reads Salt, Garlic, Spices (Including Black Pepper and Red Pepper), Onion, Sunflower Oil, Natural Flavor and Extractives of Paprika. Garlic has moved from third to second. That is the order rule doing its job: take salt out and something else rises past the spices. It is also the order rule’s limit. The list cannot tell you by how much.

“Spices” and “natural flavor” are lawful blanks

21 CFR 101.22 defines a spice as an aromatic vegetable substance, whole, broken or ground, whose significant function is seasoning, “except for those substances which have been traditionally regarded as foods, such as onions, garlic and celery.” Paragraph (h)(1) then lets every true spice in a product be declared with the single word “spice”.

The word can only hide spices. In a 1980 compliance policy guide on seasonings, FDA said it had “consistently refused” to let things like salt, dextrose, onion powder, garlic powder, citric acid and monosodium glutamate be declared as spices or flavourings. They must appear by their common names. So when a blend says “spices,” you know what kind of thing is inside, and not which.

“Natural flavor” is broader. Its definition covers an essential oil, oleoresin, essence, extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, whose flavouring constituents come from a spice, fruit, vegetable, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy, or fermentation products of those. The phrase tells you that the source was once alive. Very little else.

That is not a loophole somebody slipped through. It is the rule working as written, and it lets a maker keep a flavour formula private. It is also the single largest reason a seasoning label cannot be reverse-engineered.

What the allergen statement covers, and what it does not

US law names nine major food allergens: milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans and sesame. Sesame is the newest, added by the FASTER Act and effective on 1 January 2023. Each must be declared either in parentheses after the ingredient — “flour (wheat)” — or in a “Contains” statement beside the list.

The useful detail is where the rule reaches. FDA’s labelling guide says the allergen requirements apply to any ingredient, including flavorings, colorings and incidental additives. So “natural flavor” cannot lawfully conceal wheat, milk, soy or sesame. It can conceal everything that is not on the list of nine. Celery and mustard, both regulated allergens in the European Union, are not on it.

Two further limits. “May contain” statements are voluntary in the US; FDA says they are not required by law. And the absence of a Contains line means only that no listed allergen is an ingredient. It is not a test result. None of the Montreal ingredients is one of the nine, so the rule requires no Contains statement for it, and the absence of one would mean exactly that and no more.

Anti-caking agents, and what can leave the label

Seasonings cake, so many carry a flow agent. Silicon dioxide, the commonest, is limited to 2 per cent of the food by weight under 21 CFR 172.480, which places it in the small-print tail almost by definition. The Montreal list names none.

What surprises people is that some additives never reach the list at all. FDA exempts incidental additives present at insignificant levels with no technical or functional effect in the finished food; its labelling guide says such an ingredient need not be declared, and makes an exception only for major allergens. An anti-caking agent that was in the salt as bought, and does nothing in the finished blend, can lawfully drop off. The ingredient list is a declaration, not a chemical inventory. Our seasoning salt piece covers what the typical flow agents are.

“Sea salt” on a panel tells you where the water came from

Paragraph (h)(4) of 101.22 requires sodium chloride used as an ingredient to be declared by its common name, “salt.” Words in front of it — coarse, sea, kosher — are qualifiers the maker chose. We found no US regulation that defines any of them.

So “sea salt” as the first ingredient of a blend says nothing about whether the salt was washed, refined, dried hard, or carried its own anti-caking agent into the jar. As our reading of Maldon showed, two salts with that phrase can differ by two orders of magnitude in what else they contain. We do not think “sea salt” on a blend is dishonest. We think it is uninformative, which is a different complaint.

A caveat on our own source: the Montreal figures come from the ingredient text and a nutrition-panel image on McCormick’s product pages, read on 24 September 2026, not from a jar in hand. Product pages can lag packaging. If the jar in front of you differs, the jar is the legal label. We also could not see the full nutrition panel for the 25% less sodium version, so we report only its ingredient order.