2.3. Product Evaluation Using the CAI Uniform Nutrition Criteria

Each product was evaluated based on the nutritional criteria outlined in the CAI White Paper for its respective subcategory [17]. For a product to “meet” the CAI Uniform Nutrition Criteria, it had to satisfy the criteria for both the “nutrients to limit” (e.g., sodium, total sugars) and the “nutrients to encourage” (e.g., whole grains, fibre and calcium). For example, to meet the Uniform Nutrition Criteria, a serving of cookies per stated size must contain: ≤150 kcal; ≤1.5 g of saturated fat; ≤190 mg of sodium; ≤10 g of sugars; ≥8 g of whole grain or 2 g of fiber, or ≥5% of the Daily Value (DV) of any essential nutrient (other than sodium) [17]. In this analysis, essential nutrients were considered to be vitamin C, vitamin A, calcium and iron, since these were the only nutrients available on all product NFts. Additionally, some of the CAI’s “nutrients to encourage” had to be estimated, such as whether the product contained the required 8 g of whole grain or ½ serving of Milk and Alternatives [17]. These could not be calculated directly from information on-package and instead were estimated from the ingredients lists. To increase the precision of our evaluations, these estimations were only conducted if they were the only remaining criterion that a product had to meet in order to satisfy the CAI criteria.

Products that required preparation (e.g., powdered puddings, dry pancake mix), were evaluated using the nutrient values for the “as consumed” version of the product in FLIP 2013; otherwise, “as purchased” values were used for all calculations.