Calories and labelling on the menu: how a chicken restaurant meets the SFDA requirements

In earlier lessons of this course the menu was a pricing and design tool: how to cost a dish, how to arrange items so they sell. In Saudi Arabia the menu is no longer only a marketing document — it is a regulated one, much like the label on a packaged product. The number you print next to a dish is a declaration by your establishment: it can be inspected, you can be held to it, and you must be able to show where it came from. What surprises most operators is that compliance is not judged by the board on the wall alone, but by every surface your items appear on — including the delivery apps, which are usually run by a completely different person from the one who printed the menu.

What changed, and when#

None of this arrived overnight. Nutrition labelling in Saudi food service began as voluntary pledges in 2017, became enforceable from 2019, and was later extended to food delivery applications in 2023. Then on 1 July 2025 a broader set of requirements announced by the Saudi Food and Drug Authority (SFDA) came into force, adding three elements on top of the calorie figure: a mark on items high in salt, disclosure of caffeine content in beverages, and a statement of the approximate time needed to burn off an item's calories. The authority urged establishments to comply fully in order to avoid penalties.

• A calorie figure for every item on the menu — food, beverage or dessert.
• A symbol flagging items classified as high in salt.
• The caffeine content of beverages that contain it.
• The approximate time needed to burn off the item's calories, as a physical-activity mark.
• The same duty on printed menus, screens, digital menus and ordering apps and websites.

The delivery-app half is where compliance actually breaks. In a study published in Frontiers in Nutrition in 2023, researchers examined 120 restaurants in Riyadh on one widely used delivery application and found 43.3% non-compliant with calorie-labelling requirements, 32.5% partially compliant, and only 24.2% fully compliant. More telling still: among restaurants whose own websites carried correct figures, 40% failed to present the same information inside the delivery app. The failure is usually not in calculating the numbers — it is that nobody carried them across to the second channel.

The same study showed a pattern worth noting: restaurants offering one or two food categories were clearly more compliant, while those offering three or more were three times more likely to be non-compliant. The operational message is blunt — every expansion of the menu multiplies the labelling workload. A bloated chicken menu with dozens of combinations and add-ons is a burden not only on the kitchen, but on your compliance file too.

Treat the delivery-app listing as a copy of the official menu, not as a marketing post. Any change to a recipe or portion must reach both channels the same day, and the person with edit access to the app should be known by name.

Where the numbers come from in a real kitchen#

A nutrition figure is neither guessed nor copied from another restaurant. There are two defensible routes: laboratory analysis of a sample of the finished dish, or calculation from a standardised recipe using credible food-composition tables for each ingredient. Lab analysis is more accurate and more expensive, and it suits your core, stable, best-selling items. Calculation from the recipe is the practical route for the rest of the menu, and it has one prerequisite: a genuine standardised recipe — weights in grams, not words like a piece, a pinch, a spoonful.

1. Write the standardised recipe in grams per ingredient — marinade, sauce, bread and the sides that come with it included.
2. Take each ingredient's value per 100 g from a credible food-composition table, and use the right state: raw or cooked.
3. Compute each ingredient's contribution: weight divided by 100, multiplied by the per-100 g value.
4. Add the fat actually absorbed in cooking, established by weighing before and after frying rather than by estimate.
5. Sum the ingredients and divide by the real number of portions if the dish is shared, and state the portion clearly on the menu.
6. Document the calculation on one sheet per item, and revisit it whenever the supplier, the recipe or the portion size changes.

A simple worked example makes the point. Raw boneless skinless chicken breast carries roughly 120 kcal per 100 g in the USDA food-composition database, so a 150 g raw portion contributes about 180 kcal. Vegetable oil is about 884 kcal per 100 g — it is nearly pure fat at 9 kcal per gram — so every 10 g of absorbed oil adds roughly 88 kcal. Note the ratio: 10 g of oil, barely visible on the plate, adds about half of what the chicken breast itself adds. That is why the biggest source of error in a chicken restaurant is not the meat; it is the fryer and the sauce.

Measure oil pick-up properly once: weigh a batch before frying and again after draining and cooling, repeat three times and take the average. One correct absorption figure beats ten estimates — and it feeds your cost calculation as well.

The labelling mistakes chicken restaurants keep making#

• A combo carries the figure for the main item only, with no fries, drink or dipping sauce counted.
• Paid add-ons — extra cheese, an extra sauce, a second bread — carry no figures at all, though they are sold as items.
• Large and regular sizes share the same number, because nobody redid the maths after the portion changed.
• A family bucket shows one ambiguous figure that never says whether it is per piece or for the whole box.
• The recipe, the supplier or the frying oil changed, and the menu figure has stood unchanged for a year.
• The Arabic and English versions of the same menu disagree on the number.
• The app menu is a photograph of a printed one: the information is visually present, but unreadable and unsearchable.

Salt and caffeine: what the marks mean for a chicken menu#

The salt mark is no side issue in a chicken restaurant, because three of our most common steps are direct salt sources: brining, marinating and the breading mix before frying. The World Health Organization recommends adults stay under 5 g of salt a day in total — about a teaspoon — a daily ceiling that a single heavy item can consume on its own. In practice that means fried and brined items are the first candidates to carry the symbol, and cutting salt in the brine or the coating is an operational decision with a direct effect on how your menu looks.

Caffeine concerns the drinks side of the menu. The widely cited health guidance is a safe daily limit of about 400 mg for most adults and about 200 mg during pregnancy. The hard part is not the single espresso but blended and iced drinks, where the dose moves with the number of shots — so fix the shot count in the standardised recipe first, then write the number. The authority has pointed to support tools for establishments, including a caffeine calculator; use it instead of estimating.

Who owns this file in the restaurant#

Compliance usually collapses for an administrative reason, not a technical one: nobody owns the file. Give every item a single calculation sheet with an owner's name and a last-reviewed date, and make any kitchen recipe change trigger a mandatory update of the sheet and of both the printed and digital menus. Keep the sheets together somewhere you can produce them during an inspection — a number with no written origin is hard to defend. Anyone buying from one supplier against a fixed specification will find this far easier, which is one more reason to lock down supplier and specification as this course argued at the start.

Before publishing any new menu, ask five questions: does every item have a figure? Does the figure describe the dish as actually served, with its add-ons? Is the portion clearly defined? Do the Arabic and English versions match? And did the update reach the delivery apps the same day?

The conclusion is that menu labelling is not extra paperwork bolted onto the kitchen — it is the natural extension of the discipline this course has been building: standardised recipes by weight, a stable supplier against a clear specification, defined portions, and records you can produce. A restaurant with those four can calculate its calories in days. A restaurant without them will discover that the problem was never the labelling; it was that the dishes themselves were never under control.