A nutrition information panel carries two numbers for nearly everything on it: one for a single serving, one for every 100 grams. The second column exists so you can hold two foods up against each other and compare like with like. It stops working the moment a pack asks you to add water before eating it, and nothing on the front of the pack says so.
Bellamy’s Organic Baby Rice with Prebiotic (GOS), a 125 g pouch marked 4+ MONTHS, is that pack. Turn it over and the panel is headed Average quantity of prepared cereal, not the powder sitting in the pouch, the cereal once you’ve mixed it. Every figure under that heading, in both the per-serving column and the per-100 g column, describes the bowl you make. None of it describes the bag you bought.
Why both columns describe the bowl
That isn’t a Bellamy’s house style. It’s the Food Standards Code, and it leaves no room to choose otherwise. Standard 1.2.8-11 states plainly: If the label on a package of a food for sale indicates that the food should be reconstituted with water before consumption, the nutrition information panel must express the information required by this Standard as a proportion of the reconstituted food. Every pack inside this Standard whose label tells you to reconstitute it works this way, because the Code requires it. A marketing team gets no say in the matter. One product sits outside it: Standard 1.2.8-3 says the Standard does not apply to infant formula products. A formula tin carries a different declaration under Standard 2.9.1, expressed per 100 mL of made-up formula, never per 100 g, so none of the arithmetic below transfers to a tin.
Look at what “per 100 g” is defined as. Standard 1.2.8-4 sets the unit quantity for a solid or semi-solid food at 100 grams, no exception written in for a food you rehydrate first. Combine the two clauses and the pouch’s Per 100 g column can only ever mean one thing: 100 g of made-up cereal, water, powder and all.
Standard 1.2.8-6(1) sets out what that panel has to contain, it requires the number of servings in the package, the average quantity of the food in a serving expressed in ... grams, and the energy and nutrient content for both a serving and the unit quantity. That’s where Bellamy’s Approx. 17 servings and 67 g serving size come from: the Code makes the business declare them, though not what number to pick.
Doing the arithmetic the panel leaves for you
Bellamy’s own preparation steps show how that 67 g gets built. Step 2 reads Measure 3 tablespoons (60 mL) of cooled, boiled water into the bowl; step 3 reads Add 1 tablespoon (7 g) of cereal and stir. Seven grams of dry cereal stirred into 60 mL of water is the entire serving, roughly one part powder to eight and a half parts water by weight. Picture it as one tablespoon of dry cereal swimming in three tablespoons of water, which is exactly what the two lines above tell you to do. Check the panel against its own arithmetic and it holds: 116 kJ in a 67 g serving works out to 173 kJ per 100 g (116 ÷ 67 × 100), exactly the figure printed one column over.
Water carries no energy of its own, so all 116 kJ in that serving comes from the 7 g of dry cereal. Run the same sum on the powder alone, 116 ÷ 7 × 100, and you land on roughly 1,660 kJ per 100 g of the cereal actually sitting in the pouch, nine and a half times the 173 kJ printed one column over. The pouch doesn’t print that number anywhere. It’s arithmetic on two figures the pack does print, and it only holds if the water really does add nothing; the panel’s own two printed figures reconcile on that same assumption.
Cereal against snack, once you strip the water back out
So which number do you reach for, standing in an aisle holding two packs? Per 100 g is still the right column, but only once both foods are measured in the same state. Line the cereal’s printed 173 kJ per 100 g up against Bellamy’s Organic Apple Snacks, a 20 g pack of freeze-dried apple with no water added at any stage. Its own pack puts that snack at 12 months and over, where the cereal is marked 4+ MONTHS, so what follows compares two panels and not two things you’d buy for the same child. The snack’s panel reads 1,520 kJ per 100 g. Read those two figures side by side and the cereal looks like roughly a ninth of the energy (1520 ÷ 173 ≈ 8.8). That’s a real gap, and most of what makes it is water.
Put the two 100-g-of-powder figures next to each other instead, the cereal’s derived 1,660 kJ against the snack’s printed 1,520 kJ, and the cereal comes out the denser of the two. The panel never runs that conversion for you. It hands you the two halves of the sum, the serving size in grams of dry cereal and the energy per serving, and leaves the reconstituting-back-out step to you.
Hard rule, business choice, or arithmetic
Not everything on this pouch carries the same weight. That both columns must describe the reconstituted cereal (Standard 1.2.8-11) is a rule; the size beneath it is not. Food Standards Australia New Zealand says plainly: The serving size is determined by the food business and can sometimes vary between products. Bellamy’s picked one tablespoon; a different brand could pick two, and you’d never see the Code object. The 1,660 kJ figure above sits a rung further down again: it isn’t declared anywhere, hard or soft. It’s arithmetic this post did on numbers Bellamy’s printed, and it only stands up if the water really does contribute nothing.
A different percentage, on the same panel
Look further down the same column and there’s a third number worth separating from the other two: 1.44 mg (48% RDI#) next to iron, in the per-serving column. That percentage is not built the same way as the kind printed on an adult snack. Standard 1.2.8-9(4) makes a recommended-dietary-intake percentage voluntary on food for infants, Bellamy’s chose to print one for iron, and nothing in the Code required it to. The pack says what the 48% is a percentage of: One serve provides an average of 48% of the #Recommended Dietary Intake (RDI) of iron for babies up to 6 months of age. So it hangs off the serving size, which is the rung the business picks. The optional percentage daily intake (%DI) figure some adult packs carry works differently again: Standard 1.2.8-8(3) pins any %DI a business chooses to include to reference values built for an adult day, 8 700 kJ, sodium 2 300 mg, sugars 90 g. An infant pack’s RDI percentage and an adult snack’s %DI can sit in the same corner of a label, both look like the same kind of number, and measure a baby’s serving against two entirely different people.
Where the two pages disagree with themselves
Here’s what this post can’t settle. Open either Bellamy’s product page and you’ll find two versions of the same panel: the numbers printed on the pack artwork shown in the photo, and a second set typed into the page’s own “Nutritional Info” tab. On the baby rice, the pack photo prints 116 kJ and 173 kJ; the typed tab says 118 kJ and 177 kJ, and the GOS content reads 0.14 g per 100 g on the artwork against 0.2 g in the tab. The apple snack carries the same kind of gap: 78.2 g of carbohydrate per 100 g on the pack against 81 g in the tab.
The Code writes its panel requirement around the package. Standard 1.2.8-5(1) makes a nutrition information panel the required information on packaged food for the labelling provisions, and those provisions sit in Standard 1.2.1, which defines a label broadly enough that where a brand’s own web copy lands is not a question this post can answer. What it can say is narrower and more useful to you: the panel on the pouch in your hand is the one the Code is written around, and it’s the one you can read at the shelf. It’s not clear which of the two figures is more current, or why they differ, and that could not be settled from either page alone.
One more thing the Code does that’s easy to miss on a pouch this small: small packages are exempt from carrying a nutrition panel at all, under Standard 1.2.8-5(2)(b), except, by name, food for infants. However small an infant pouch gets, the panel stays on it.
General information, not medical advice. Chat with your GP or child health nurse.