Nutrition Facts

I have always wondered how accurate the nutrition facts on food items are.

Vitamin C for 140g of blueberries - % Daily Value
Compliments Organic Wild Blueberries - 4%
Bergen Farms - 10%
Snowcrest - 6%

Compliments and Snowcrest responded to my inquiry on how they determine the nutrition facts (Bergen Farms didn't).

Compliments
For the Compliments Organic Wild Blueberries the Canadian Nutrient File information was used for the nutrition facts table.  The Canadian Nutrient File is a database of nutrition information published by Health Canada for common foods.  We often use this database for single ingredient, agricultural foods such as blueberries.  Lab analysis as you described would also be an acceptable method for determining nutrition fact information and we frequently use this method as well.

Snowcrest 
We can obtain the “Nutritional facts” for blueberries from two sources.

We can send a blueberries samples to the Lab and they issue a certificate with the nutritional facts. However, We found that even the same  sample was  sent to 2 different labs and we will get different results. Some of the vitamins are very heat sensitive and the Lab procedure require heat extraction to get the nutrition data. Some of the vitamins are destroyed during the extraction process. The test is based on one sample.

The most accurate way is to get the nutrients data from the USDA web site. USDA update their web site on a regular basis. The Nutrition facts data from the USDA web site is the average result  of many test samples. Canadian Food Inspection agency does not have similar nutrient data base web site but they recognize the USDA nutrition data web site as accurate.

 

 

Conclusion: What you see is not what you get!