What Is Actually in Lawry's Seasoned Salt

McCormick’s current panel for the 8 oz retail shaker of Lawry’s Seasoned Salt reads: Salt, Sugar, Spices (Including Paprika, Celery Seed, Turmeric), Onion, Corn Starch, Garlic, Tricalcium Phosphate (to Make Free Flowing), Extractives of Paprika & Natural Flavor. The Nutrition Facts give 380 mg of sodium per ¼ tsp (1.2 g). Worked back from that figure, the blend is roughly four-fifths salt by weight. McCormick labels it No MSG Added, kosher and fat free.

The panel, word for word

Ingredient lists in the United States run in descending order of predominance by weight. That is the rule in 21 CFR 101.4, and it is the only quantitative information an ingredient list carries. So the first thing the Lawry’s panel tells you is that there is more salt in it than anything else, more sugar than any single spice, and more onion than garlic.

The full retail panel, as McCormick publishes it on the 8 oz product page:

• Salt
• Sugar
• Spices (Including Paprika, Celery Seed, Turmeric)
• Onion
• Corn Starch
• Garlic
• Tricalcium Phosphate (to Make Free Flowing)
• Extractives of Paprika & Natural Flavor

The 40 oz foodservice container, sold on the same McCormick site, carries a different panel: SALT, SUGAR, SPICES (INCLUDING PAPRIKA, TURMERIC), ONION, CORN STARCH, GARLIC, NATURAL FLAVOR, AND EXTRACTIVES OF PAPRIKA. No celery seed is named and there is no tricalcium phosphate. Whether that is a different formula or a label that has not caught up, the page does not say. We note it rather than guess.

How much of it is salt

The label does not say, but the sodium line lets you estimate it. 380 mg in 1.2 g is about 317 mg of sodium per gram of product. Pure sodium chloride is 39.3 per cent sodium by weight, or 393 mg per gram. Divide one by the other and the salt content comes out at roughly 80 per cent.

That is our arithmetic, not a McCormick figure, and it carries two soft edges. First, both inputs are rounded. Sodium on a Nutrition Facts panel above 140 mg is rounded to the nearest 10 mg, so the true value could sit anywhere from 375 to 385 mg, and a serving weight under 2 g is stated to the nearest 0.1 g, so 1.2 g could be 1.15 to 1.25 g. Taken together, the salt share could be anything from about 76 to 85 per cent. Second, it assumes nearly all the sodium comes from the salt. Tricalcium phosphate contains none. “Natural flavor” is undisclosed, so it could carry a little. Neither changes the conclusion: this is a salt with things in it, not a spice mix with salt in it.

Everything else — sugar, the spices, onion, starch, garlic, the flow agent, the paprika extract and the flavour — shares the remaining fifth. Because sugar is listed second, it outweighs each ingredient after it, which puts it somewhere below 20 per cent and above whatever the spices weigh.

Why the panel says zero carbohydrate when sugar is second

This is the thing people reasonably get wrong. Sugar is the second ingredient, and the Nutrition Facts panel says Total Carbohydrate 0g and Calories 0. Both statements are true at once.

Federal rules let a manufacturer declare carbohydrate as zero when a serving contains less than 0.5 g, and calories as zero below 5. A serving here is 1.2 g of product. Even if a fifth of it were sugar, that is about a quarter of a gram, and it rounds to nothing. The zero describes the serving size, not the recipe.

For the cook the sugar matters more than the zero suggests. Sugar adds sweetness and browns under heat, which is part of why a seasoned salt tastes rounded rather than simply salty. That is general kitchen chemistry, not a McCormick statement. That is a design choice and a coherent one. It is not a hidden ingredient; it is the second word on the panel.

Why paprika and turmeric are named and the other spices are not

US labelling law lets spices be declared collectively as “spices”. It makes an exception for spices that are also colours: paprika, turmeric and saffron must be declared as “spice and coloring” or by their own name. That is why paprika and turmeric appear inside the brackets. They are there partly because they are what makes the blend orange.

“Extractives of paprika” points the same way. FDA lists paprika oleoresin, the extract of paprika, as a colour additive in its own right, describing it as a combination of flavour and colour principles. So the orange tint on a Lawry’s-seasoned potato comes from three places on the panel, and not one of them is a mystery.

Celery seed has no such requirement. It could legally sit inside “spices” unnamed, and on the 40 oz panel it apparently does.

What changed: celery seed on the label

There is a reformulated Lawry’s, and it is the 25% Less Sodium version, covered below. On the original, the visible difference is between two of McCormick’s own labels.

The 8 oz retail panel names celery seed inside the spices bracket. The 40 oz foodservice panel on the same site does not. Whether that means the recipe changed or only the disclosure, the product pages, as we read them in September 2026, do not say.

What the law says is clear enough. FDA’s list of major food allergens has nine entries: milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans and sesame. Celery is not on it, so there is no US requirement to name it, and it can sit inside “spices”. That makes both readings possible: a new ingredient, or an old one newly disclosed. We cannot tell which from the labels, and we are not going to guess.

The 25% Less Sodium version, side by side

This is where the formulation genuinely differs, and McCormick’s own panels show how.

Three points follow from the table. The actual reduction on the printed figures is 110 mg out of 380, which is 29 per cent, not 25. FDA allows a “less sodium” claim only where the product has at least 25 per cent less sodium than an appropriate reference food, so 25 is the claim the rule permits, and the label clears it. Second, the sodium came down because potassium chloride went in, second on the list, ahead of sugar. The estimates in the last two rows are our arithmetic from the sodium and potassium lines, using the known sodium and potassium content of the two salts, and they are approximate. Third, everything after salt is otherwise the same list in the same order.

Potassium chloride tastes different from sodium chloride, and McCormick’s product page claims the same great taste as the original. Whether it does is your tongue’s business, not ours. What potassium chloride is and how it behaves in cooking is covered in potassium chloride vs sodium chloride, and the label vocabulary around it in lite salt vs salt substitute.

Seventeen herbs and spices, according to the company

Both McCormick and Lawry’s Restaurants, the separate company that still runs the restaurant, tell the same origin story. Lawrence Frank and Walter Van de Kamp opened Lawry’s The Prime Rib in Beverly Hills in 1938. The restaurant company’s timeline says Frank spent three months experimenting in his home kitchen and arrived at a combination of 17 herbs and spices to go with prime rib, and that Lawry’s Seasoned Salt was born that year. McCormick’s brand page says the blend was kept in shakers on the tables and that Frank then launched a separate company to put it in shops.

Seventeen is a company history claim. The current panel names paprika, celery seed, turmeric, onion and garlic, and the law lets the rest sit inside “spices”. The panel can neither confirm nor contradict the number, so we repeat it as the company’s and leave it there.

The brand is now McCormick’s. It bought Lawry’s from Unilever in 2008, and the Federal Trade Commission made it sell its own Season-All line to Morton as a condition. The FTC’s reasoning was that the two brands together would have given McCormick nearly 80 per cent of the US market for branded seasoned salts. Seasoned salt was, for once, a market a regulator measured.

What this means for how it seasons

The useful fact is the four-fifths. A pinch of Lawry’s is mostly a pinch of salt, with sugar and aromatics riding on it. Used on top of a dish that is already salted, it salts it again. Used instead of salt, it seasons much as salt would, gram for gram delivering around four-fifths of the sodium, plus sweetness and colour.

That is how seasoning salts are meant to work, and what seasoning salt is covers the category. For the sodium arithmetic across plain salts, which is the same arithmetic used here, see sodium by salt type. None of it is a reason to use Lawry’s or not. It is a reason to know which one of your ingredients is the salt.

A caveat on our sourcing. The ingredient lists are McCormick’s product-page text, and the Nutrition Facts were read from the panel images on those pages, dated November 2024 in their file names. We have not bought a shaker to compare. The 40 oz foodservice panel disagrees with the retail panel and we could not resolve why. The salt and potassium chloride percentages are our calculations from rounded label figures, not numbers McCormick publishes.