Sodium or Salt? How to Read an Imported Snack Label in Singapore

Walk down any snack aisle in Singapore and a good chunk of what you pick up was labelled somewhere else first. A Japanese rice cracker, a Korean seaweed pack, a European biscuit tin — each one was printed to satisfy a different country's rules before it ever reached a shelf here. That matters more than it sounds, because the single most useful number on the back of a snack packet, the salt number, is written three different ways depending on where the pack came from.

If you have ever compared two packets and thought one looked dramatically saltier than the other, there is a decent chance you were comparing a sodium figure to a salt figure. They measure the same thing. They are not the same number.

Sodium and salt are not interchangeable numbers

Table salt is sodium chloride. Only about 40% of it is sodium by weight — the rest is chloride. So a label can report either the sodium content or the total salt equivalent, and the two differ by a factor of roughly 2.5.

The European Commission's guidance on dietary salt spells out the convention used across the EU: under Regulation (EU) 1169/2011, prepacked foods must declare salt rather than sodium, calculated as salt = sodium × 2.5, expressed per 100 g. Japan has moved in a similar direction. As FoodNavigator reported in March 2026, Japan's Consumer Affairs Agency released national front-of-pack labelling guidelines in which the sodium content "must also be converted to the dietary salt equivalent and displayed as such" — highlighted in a double-lined box to draw the eye. Those guidelines are currently voluntary, and a 2024 CAA survey cited in the same report found only about 16% of Japanese products carried the front-of-pack information at all.

Practically, that gives you two quick conversions at the shelf:

  • A pack listing salt 1.5 g contains roughly 600 mg of sodium (1.5 ÷ 2.5).
  • A pack listing 食塩相当量 1.2 g (salt equivalent) contains roughly 470 mg of sodium.
  • Going the other way, 500 mg of sodium is about 1.25 g of salt.

Almost nobody does this conversion in their head

This is not a failure of effort. It is a known, measured problem. A study by Takimoto and colleagues published in Hypertension Research surveyed 683 attendees at Japan's 7th National Shokuiku (food education) Conference in 2012 — an audience unusually interested in nutrition — and asked them to work out the salt equivalent of 1,000 mg of sodium. Only 13.3% got it right. The authors concluded that salt content in grams, not sodium, should be printed on packages if labels are going to be useful for salt reduction at all.

The honest takeaway is not "try harder at mental arithmetic." It is that you only need a rough sense of scale. If the salt figure is above about 1 g per serving, that serving is carrying a meaningful share of your day's sodium, whichever unit the pack happens to use.

What that share actually is, in Singapore terms

The Health Promotion Board's benchmark is 2,000 mg of sodium a day — about 5 g of salt, or a level teaspoon. According to HPB's "Less Salt, More Taste" release, the National Nutrition Survey 2022 found Singaporeans averaging about 3,600 mg of sodium a day — close to double that limit — with 9 in 10 residents exceeding it. HPB also noted that sodium levels in local dishes rose by 22% between 2010 and 2023.

Worth keeping in proportion: HPB is clear that the dominant source is salt, sauces and seasonings in food eaten outside the home, not packaged snacks. A snack packet is rarely the reason someone's sodium intake is high. But when you are already averaging 3,600 mg, an extra 600 mg from something you ate standing up at 4pm is not nothing either.

What the pack in front of you is legally required to say

Here is where the Singapore layer comes in. The Singapore Food Agency requires all prepacked food offered for sale here to meet local labelling requirements, and puts that responsibility on the importer, not the overseas manufacturer. SFA notes plainly that manufacturers' labels "may not meet SFA's requirements as they often cater to multiple countries," and that importers can apply sticker labels carrying the required information.

So that white sticker slapped over part of a foreign-language pack is not a nuisance — it is often the only part of the label written for you. Two things follow. First, if an imported snack has no English information at all, something is off with how it got to that shelf. Second, SFA's requirements are anchored to Codex standards, and a separate amendment to the Food Regulations took effect on 30 January 2026, so labels on newer stock may look different from older stock of the same product. Note also that since 2 May 2024, nutrition labelling and nutrition and health claims in Singapore are regulated by MOH and HPB rather than SFA.

A 15-second check at the shelf

  1. Find the unit first. Is the pack telling you sodium (mg) or salt (g)? Don't compare across the two without converting.
  2. Find the basis. Per 100 g, per serving, or per pack? Imported panels vary, and a small pack's "per 100 g" column can flatter a bag you will finish in one sitting.
  3. Read the importer sticker. It carries the English ingredients, allergen information and country of origin that the original label may not.

None of this makes an imported snack good or bad. It just means you are comparing like with like — which is more than most shelf-side decisions manage.

Where we sit

We think about this a lot at HexaCrunch, because our own packs have to clear exactly the same bar. Our baked brown-rice crackers are made in Singapore with cricket protein for a nutrition profile we are happy to have read closely — sodium, protein and all — rather than skimmed. If you would like to put our label through the three checks above yourself, the Try-All 3-Pack is the easiest place to start.

Sources

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