Calculating Nutrition Information for Commercial Food Labeling I'm working on starting a small home-based bakery that will ship food products sold on a website directly to consumers. (Specifically, cookies.) As part of this work, I am designing packaging and am looking into FDA-compliant nutrition labels. Even though this two-person part-time business easily qualifies for an exemption, my preference is to nonetheless provide nutrition information as I believe it would be helpful to customers. At the same time, I believe providing inaccurate information is worse than no information at all. There is an extreme amount of conversation on calorie calculation for personal diets (including here and here), but little I can find on calculation for commercial purposes.

Obviously, nutritional information can be derived through laboratory tests and I have found many such services online.

Another possible solution (that I use for my own diet) is to simply "add-up" ingredient values from their respective labels. This method seems like a great solution but I'm concerned about its accuracy on an FDA-compliant label, especially after baking. I am skeptical of this process because:


I recall from high school chemistry that frying an egg changes its chemical composition and I'm assuming also its nutritional value, and
It is commonly stated online that processed foods have altered nutrition values.


My question is in three parts:


Are these concerns about the "add-up" process accurate enough to disqualify it from a commercial level of nutrition labeling?
Are there other methods I can use to calculate nutrition information accurately enough to meet FDA requirements without needing laboratory analysis?
Do you have any other advice on this process or topic for a small business trying to balance providing this information voluntarily and the costs of hiring outside help?


Thank you.
Use Wolfram Alpha, it is just adding them up. But any lab result has to use average ingredient figures too. You need to allow for variance in supply i.e protein level of flour changes with variety and season.

It produces pretty labels, all ready to go!

e.g. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100g+flour+and+100g+butter+and+50g+sugar