Daily Value data and methodology
Where Daily Value’s labels come from: USDA’s FNDDS 2021–2023 nutrient data, how servings were chosen and how FDA rounding is applied.
Where the nutrients come from
Every label in Daily Value is drawn from the USDA Agricultural Research Service’s FoodData Central, using the Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies (FNDDS) 2021–2023, in its October 2024 release. FNDDS is the database USDA uses to turn the foods people report eating in What We Eat in America, the dietary part of the national health and nutrition survey, into nutrients. For each food it lists the amount of every nutrient in 100 grams, and Daily Value reads 13 of them: calories, total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, total carbohydrate, dietary fiber, total sugars, protein, vitamin D, calcium, iron and potassium. It multiplies each by the weight of the serving and divides by 100, so a label is the per-100 g values scaled to one serving. Because these are USDA’s survey values for a generic food as people eat it, a label describes that kind of food in general, not any one brand or recipe.
How each field is defined
| Field | Definition |
|---|---|
| Group | The food’s USDA What We Eat in America (WWEIA) category, such as Citrus fruits: one of 136 in the game. It matches for the same category and reads close for the same top-level group, one of nine. |
| Density | Calories per 100 grams: the calories in one serving divided by the serving’s weight in grams, times 100, from the unrounded values. |
| Serving | The weight in grams of the food’s serving, from FNDDS. |
| Protein | Grams of protein in one serving, unrounded. The comparison never measures against less than 1 g. |
| Fat | Grams of total fat in one serving, unrounded. The comparison never measures against less than 1 g. |
| Sodium | Milligrams of sodium in one serving, unrounded. The comparison never measures against less than 20 mg. |
How the servings were chosen
A label is only as meaningful as its serving. For each food, a person picked one of the household portions FNDDS lists, with a count where one wasn’t enough, such as 2 tablespoons of peanut butter, to match the FDA’s reference amounts customarily consumed, the table in 21 CFR 101.12 that the FDA uses to set serving sizes. The match is made by hand, food by food, so it is a judgment call: a different reasonable serving would print different numbers. The label shows a generic unit, one of cup, tbsp, tsp, oz, fl oz, slice, piece, small, medium, large, container, can or bottle, and the portion’s weight in grams, taken from FNDDS and never typed in. So a banana reads 1 medium (126g), not 1 banana. The serving line is capped at 24 characters so it never wraps.
Rounding and % Daily Value
The amounts a label prints follow the FDA’s labelling rules in 21 CFR 101.9, and the table below shows each one. The % Daily Value column uses the FDA’s Daily Values for adults and children aged 4 and over: 78 g of total fat, 20 g of saturated fat, 300 mg of cholesterol, 2,300 mg of sodium, 275 g of total carbohydrate, 28 g of dietary fiber, 20 mcg of vitamin D, 1,300 mg of calcium, 18 mg of iron and 4,700 mg of potassium. It is worked out from the unrounded amount, to the nearest whole percent for fat, cholesterol, sodium, carbohydrate and fiber, and to the nearest 2 percent up to 10, the nearest 5 up to 50 and the nearest 10 above for vitamins and minerals, with anything under 2 percent shown as 0. Protein and total sugars show no percentage. The clues compare the unrounded values, not the printed ones.
| Label line | Printed as |
|---|---|
| Calories | Zero below 5, the nearest 5 up to 50, the nearest 10 above. |
| Total fat and saturated fat | Zero below 0.5 g, the nearest 0.5 g below 5 g, the nearest gram from 5 g. |
| Cholesterol | Zero below 2 mg, “<5mg” from 2 mg up to 5 mg, the nearest 5 mg above. |
| Sodium | Zero below 5 mg, the nearest 5 mg up to 140 mg, the nearest 10 mg above. |
| Total carbohydrate, fiber, sugars and protein | Zero below 0.5 g, “<1g” from 0.5 g up to 1 g, the nearest gram above. |
| Vitamin D, iron, calcium and potassium | In the increments of the FDA’s Food Labeling Guide: vitamin D and iron to the nearest 0.1, calcium and potassium to the nearest 10 mg. |
Why trans fat and added sugars are blank
A real label has lines for trans fat and for added sugars, and both show a dash here. FNDDS has no values for either, so Daily Value doesn’t guess: a footnote on every label says that USDA’s survey data has no trans fat or added sugars values. Total sugars are in the data, so that line is shown.
Which foods are included
Daily Value has 442 foods. Each is an FNDDS food under a plainer name, such as Chicken noodle soup or Cheddar cheese, and the list was assembled and reviewed by hand. Foods that answer to other names are one entry with those names kept as aliases the guess box understands: 149 of the 442 have at least one. Where two foods have labels so close that the clues could not tell them apart, such as a peach and a nectarine, they are merged into one, and either name wins. Left out entirely are alcohol, baby foods, formula and human milk, and any food named for a brand.
Of the 442 foods, 228 can be the food of the day. Only one form of a food is an answer, such as raw fruit, plain bread or whole milk, and mixed dishes are held to at most 15 percent of the answers: they are 30 of the 228. The other 214 can be guessed but never come up. No answer reads blue on every clue against any other food in the game, so a wrong guess can always be told apart from the right one.
Updates and fairness
The data is fixed at the FNDDS 2021–2023 October 2024 release, and it is not updated during the year. The food chosen for a published puzzle never changes, and the schedule is fixed ahead of time, never repeating a food within 60 days. The figures may be refreshed when USDA publishes a new release or a correction, and if a correction affects a food in a future puzzle, the change is made before that day. To report a data problem, email hello@guessday.com with the puzzle number.
Attribution and independence
The data is credited to the USDA Agricultural Research Service, FoodData Central: Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies 2021–2023. FoodData Central’s data are in the public domain under CC0 1.0. Daily Value is not affiliated with USDA or the FDA. No agency logos appear in the game, and the FDA’s rules are used only to format a label and to compute its percentages. The numbers describe a generic food, not a particular product. Not dietary advice.