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Why a food app should show "not available" instead of 0
A missing value and a measured zero are not the same fact. Writing 0 for a nutrient nobody ever measured is a guess dressed up as data, and it can mislead in either direction.
Why a label can be missing a value at all
Barcode scanning apps, Nyamly included, read nutrition facts that manufacturers and contributors have already published, through the Open Food Facts database, in Nyamly's case. Not every product's entry is complete. A back-of-pack label can print calories, fat and protein clearly and still leave sugars, salt or fiber off entirely, especially for private-label goods, regional variants, or products added to the database by a volunteer working from a partial photo.
When that happens, an app has to decide what to display for the nutrient nobody ever recorded. Some apps quietly fill the gap with 0. That choice looks harmless: a nutrition card full of numbers looks more complete than one with gaps. But it replaces "unknown" with a specific, confident claim that was never actually measured.
Why 0 misleads either way
A fabricated zero can cut in two directions, depending on which nutrient it lands on:
- It can flatter a product. A sugars value defaulted to 0 g reads as "sugar-free," a genuine selling point, when the truth is simply that nobody published a number.
- It can unfairly penalize a product. A fiber value defaulted to 0 g reads as "no fiber at all," when a product with an unpublished fiber figure might well contain some. There is just no way to know from the label on file.
Either way, the person looking at the screen has no way to tell a real, measured 0 g apart from a value nobody ever supplied. The honest answer is to say so.
How Nyamly shows a gap
Nyamly never coerces a missing nutrient to zero. A value that was never published for a product is shown as unknown, not as a number: a missing value stays missing, on every screen, all the way through to the app's own internal scoring logic.
On a product card
A nutrient with no published figure shows as "Not available."
On the health score
When a nutrient the score depends on — saturated fat, sugars, salt or energy — was never published, Nyamly shows "Not enough data to score this product" and "No score," rather than computing a number from a gap filled in with zero.
On additives
An additive Nyamly hasn't reviewed yet, or a product with no additive list at all, shows as "Additive data not available for this product" or "not rated" — never defaulted to a clean pass. The same rule applies to Nutri-Score and NOVA: when Open Food Facts has no published grade for a barcode, Nyamly shows nothing for it, never a guessed one.
Two concrete examples
A store-brand frozen meal. Its label prints calories, fat and protein, but the sugars figure was never entered for that specific batch in the database. Default that gap to 0 g and the product reads as "no sugar" on the card — a claim nobody made and nobody checked. Nyamly shows "Not available" for that field instead.
A bakery item sold by weight. Its listing has no fiber figure at all — common for freshly-baked goods without a standardised nutrition panel. Defaulting that to 0 g would make a plausibly fiber-containing food look like it has none. Nyamly leaves the fiber row unfilled rather than inventing a number.
See it on a real product
Scan a barcode in Nyamly and you'll see exactly this: nutrients, Nutri-Score, NOVA and additive ratings shown honestly, gaps included. For the full methodology behind every number Nyamly does show, see how Nyamly scores a product.
