What Must a Food Product Page Show in the EU? Shopify Checklist

You have a good product, a Shopify store and your first EU customers. Then comes a question that rarely gets a clear answer: what must a food product page show in the EU? Advice online often conflicts. Some shops paste a photo of the label. Others build tabs and metafield code in their theme and hope it is right. Shop owners in Germany worry about an Abmahnung (a warning letter) over missing nutrition data.

This post is a practical checklist. It is general information based on Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011, not legal advice. Rules vary by product and by country, so confirm your specific case with your food authority or a legal adviser.

Why the product page matters for distance selling

Regulation 1169/2011 sets out the food information that has to reach consumers. For online sales, Article 14 says the mandatory food information must be available before the purchase is concluded, on the product page or by other appropriate means. The date of minimum durability or “use by” date is the exception: it only has to be there at delivery. So a label on the physical pack is not enough for a web shop. The same information has to be on the page where the shopper decides.

The checklist: what to show on each product page

The regulation lists the mandatory particulars in Article 9. For a typical prepacked food, check these:

1. Name of the food. A descriptive name, not only a brand or marketing name.
2. List of ingredients. Written as text, in descending order of weight, with the allergens emphasised.
3. Allergens, emphasised. Substances from the regulation’s allergen list (Annex II) must stand out in the ingredient list, for example in bold (Article 21). To see which Annex II allergens a list contains, check it with the free EU allergen checker.
4. Nutrition declaration. Energy, fat, saturates, carbohydrate, sugars, protein and salt, per 100 g or 100 ml. Some products are exempt, so check whether yours is.
5. Net quantity. Weight or volume.
6. Storage conditions or conditions of use, where they apply.
7. Name and address of the food business operator responsible for the information.
8. Country of origin or place of provenance, where the rules require it.
9. Other product-specific items, such as instructions for use where needed, or the alcoholic strength of drinks containing more than 1.2 per cent alcohol by volume.

Also check the rules for your product category. Food supplements, for example, have extra labelling rules of their own. For more detail on two of these points, see our guides to EU allergen information for online food shops and the EU nutrition declaration format.

Common mistakes on Shopify

• Using an image of the label. Text in a photo is hard to read on mobile, cannot be read by search engines or screen readers, and is hard to keep up to date.
• Showing the same allergen text on every product. Each product needs its own ingredients and allergens.
• Allergens not emphasised. A plain ingredient list does not do what Article 21 asks.
• Nutrition values buried in description HTML. They are hard to maintain and easy to get wrong when a recipe changes.
• No operator details. The business name and address are easy to forget.

How to add it without Liquid

You can build this by hand with metafields, Liquid and a theme tab or accordion. It works, but you maintain the code, and every new field means more wiring. The alternative is one place to enter the data and one theme block to show it.

Whichever way you choose, the steps are the same:

1. Collect the data per product. Get ingredients, allergens, nutrition values per 100 g or 100 ml and storage conditions from your own specification, lab results or producer.
2. Enter it per product. Do not copy one product’s data to another.
3. Emphasise allergens inside the ingredient text, so they sit in the list, not in a separate note.
4. Show it on the product page as text, so it stays sharp on every screen.
5. Check the live page against the pack. Do this for one product of each kind before you fill in the rest.

For a step-by-step walkthrough of the theme side, see how to show a nutrition table and bold allergens on a Shopify product page without Liquid.

Where Etiketto: EU Nutrition Labels fits

Etiketto: EU Nutrition Labels is a Shopify app for food shops selling into the EU. It shows the food information Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 requires on your product pages: a nutrition table, ingredients with allergens in bold, and the operator.

What it gives a small shop without a developer:

• One editor per product for nutrition per 100 g, ingredients, the 14 EU allergens, net quantity, storage, origin, alcohol and the operator.
• Allergens in bold where you mark them. Wrap an allergen in asterisks in the ingredient list, and the product page shows it in bold. The app does not detect allergens for you; only the words you mark are emphasised.
• A Food information theme block. Add it to the product template of an Online Store 2.0 theme, with no theme code changes, and pick a table, accordion, compact or card layout.
• Plain text on the page. The nutrition table and ingredients are HTML text, not an image, so search engines and screen readers read them like the rest of the page.

The app shows the values you enter. It does not calculate nutrition values, and it does not make a page compliant by itself. You stay responsible for the accuracy of the data and for checking which rules apply to your products.

Add the food information your EU shoppers need

Work through the checklist above for one product, then do the rest. To put the nutrition table, bold allergens and operator details on your pages from one editor and one block, install Etiketto: EU Nutrition Labels from the Shopify App Store.