Tic Tacs are about 90% sugar. So why does the label say 0 g sugar?

The label follows the rules exactly. U.S. rules let anything under 0.5 g per serving be listed as zero, and a serving of Tic Tacs is one tiny mint. Every mint's sugar rounds to nothing, but it doesn't disappear.

One mint, by the numbers

The label says
0 g sugar
per serving of 1 mint
One mint actually has
About 0.44 g
about 90% of a 0.49 g mint, just under the 0.5 g cutoff
Sixty mints
About 26 g
of sugar, roughly 6 teaspoons, from 60 servings of "0 g"

Adding up "zero"

What the labels add up to, and the sugar that's really there

Bar chart: each Tic Tac is labeled 0 grams of sugar, so the labels add up to 0 grams no matter how many you eat. The real sugar is about 0.44 grams for 1 mint, 4.4 grams for 10, 13.2 grams for 30 (about 3 teaspoons), and 26.4 grams for 60 (about 6 teaspoons). 1 mint label: 0 g × 1 = 0 g 0.44 g 10 mints label: 0 g × 10 = 0 g 4.4 g 30 mints label: 0 g × 30 = 0 g 13.2 g · about 3 teaspoons 60 mints label: 0 g × 60 = 0 g 26.4 g · about 6 teaspoons

Round a small number to zero enough times and you can hide a big one. The rule makes sense for a sprinkle of something in a normal-sized serving. But when the serving is made tiny enough, like a single half-gram mint, almost anything can fit under the cutoff and be listed as zero.

The same trick works anywhere a rule rounds per piece: "0 calories" cooking sprays with a serving of a fraction-of-a-second spray, fees split into many small charges, a "rounding error" repeated a million times. When a label says zero, check the serving size, then ask how many servings you actually have.

What "zero" have you trusted without checking how small the serving was?

What U.S. labels are allowed to call zero
On the labelCan say 0 if one serving has less than
Calories5 calories
Total sugars0.5 g
Trans fat0.5 g
Total fat0.5 g

In some places the Tic Tac label now adds a footnote that the "0 g" means "less than 0.5 g."

What about "0 g trans fat"?

For years, the same rounding let foods made with partially hydrogenated oils, the main source of artificial trans fat, list "0 g trans fat" as long as each serving had under 0.5 g. That loophole mostly closed when the FDA banned partially hydrogenated oils from U.S. food, with the final deadline in 2021. Trans fat still occurs naturally in meat and dairy, and the 0.5 g rounding rule still applies to it.

Related exhibits

Sources: U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, 21 CFR 101.9 (nutrition labeling rounding rules); Tic Tac serving size (one 0.49 g mint) and sugar share (about 90%, varying by flavor) as reported on U.S. packaging and summarized by Wikipedia; FDA, "Trans Fat" and final determination on partially hydrogenated oils. One teaspoon of sugar is taken as about 4.2 g.