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How to play Daily Value

Rules, clues, hints and streaks in Daily Value, the daily guess-the-food-from-its-nutrition-label game, explained.

The goal

Name the hidden everyday food in eight guesses or fewer, using its Nutrition Facts label as your first clue. Everyone gets the same food on the same calendar day, and a new puzzle unlocks at midnight in your own time zone. Daily Value knows 442 foods, so only food names it recognizes can be guessed, and many foods answer to other names too: typing “soda” offers Cola, “OJ” offers Orange juice, and “scallion” offers Green onion. Alcohol, baby foods and brand-name products are not in the game.

Playing a round

  1. Study the label before you type anything: the serving line with its weight in grams, the calories, and the lines for fat, sodium, carbohydrate, protein and the rest. If you like, work out the calories per 100 grams.
  2. Type a food name into the guess box and pick it from the suggestions, each shown with its group, or press Enter once it is highlighted.
  3. Read the row of feedback that appears: group, density, serving, protein, fat and sodium.
  4. Hold that row up against the label to rule foods in or out, then submit your next guess.
  5. Keep going until you name the food or use your eighth guess, whichever comes first.

Colors and arrows

Each clue is colored blue 🔵, orange 🟠 or grey (⚪ in the share grid). Blue means a match, orange means close, and grey means a miss — the exact match and close thresholds are on the “How the clues work” card below the board. Every row shows the figures for the food you guessed, so you can compare them with the label directly: its USDA category, its calories per 100 grams, the weight of its serving, and its protein, fat and sodium per serving. Density, serving, protein, fat and sodium carry an arrow, ↑ or ↓, pointing from your guess toward the hidden food: an up arrow means the hidden food’s figure is higher than your guess, a down arrow means it is lower. A row that reads Sodium 515 mg with an up arrow, for example, tells you the hidden food has more than 515 mg of sodium in a serving. Group never carries an arrow, since there is no “higher” or “lower” category: blue means the same USDA category, such as Citrus fruits, and orange means a different category in the same top-level group, such as Fruit.

Hints

Three hints are available each round, always revealed in the same order: the food’s top-level group, such as “Group: Fruit”, then the shape of its name, such as “Name: 2 words, 6 + 6 letters”, then its first letter. The name’s shape counts the letters in each word, and hyphens and apostrophes don’t count as letters. The hint is the top-level group rather than the USDA category because a category called Bananas or Pizza would give the answer away. Hints you take for free add a light bulb to your shared result. When a short optional ad is available, watching it reveals the same hint without the light bulb, so the choice between a clean solve and an assisted one is always visible to anyone you share with.

Foods that count as the same food

Some foods have labels so close that the six clues could not tell them apart, so Daily Value treats them as one food. A nectarine counts as a peach: typing “nectarine” offers Peach, and if Peach is the hidden food, guessing it by either name wins. A lime counts as a lemon in the same way, and a tangerine, a clementine or a mandarin counts as an orange. Altogether, 149 of the 442 foods answer to at least one other name, whether that is a near-twin or simply another word for the same thing, such as “fries” for French fries.

Streaks and statistics

Solving the daily puzzle on consecutive days builds your streak. Everything — streak, history and hint use — is stored in your browser rather than an account, so clearing site data resets it.

Archive and unlimited mode

The archive lets you play any past daily puzzle; archive rounds count toward your statistics but never toward your streak. Unlimited mode serves a random food whenever you finish a round, so you can practice reading labels for as long as you like.

Ready? Play today’s puzzle.