Our keto check is deliberately strict and deliberately simple: a product passes when it has at most 10g of carbohydrates and 5g of sugars per 100g. When a product has no macro data at all, we refuse to guess. Here is what those rules find across our 28,601 products: 6,770 pass, 21,156 fail, and 675 have too little data to call.
The aisle-by-aisle scoreboard
- Chocolate: 2 of 319 pass.
- Ice cream: 2 of 137.
- Cereal: 5 of 403.
- Pasta: 7 of 366.
- Chips: 8 of 283.
- Cookies and cakes: 12 of 813.
- Candy: 30 of 390.
- Sodas: 103 of 217.
Yes, sodas beat every food category, because diet sodas genuinely contain zero carbohydrates. Cereal, which markets itself as a health food, passes at just over one percent.
The "sugar-free" trap
Sugar-free chocolate is usually sweetened with maltitol, and maltitol is a carbohydrate. A typical sugar-free chocolate bar still carries 40g or more of carbs per 100g. That is why the front of the pack says "sugar free" and our verdict still says no: we read the macro table, not the marketing.
A bug we fixed, and why we mention it
For a while, 1,311 products in our database had zeros recorded where their real macros should have been, an artifact of an early import script. The result was embarrassing: a KitKat briefly passed our keto check. We have since re-pulled the real numbers from Open Food Facts for all 1,311 products and added a guard so that suspicious all-zero data is treated as missing rather than trusted.
We tell you this because a checker you cannot audit is just vibes. When our data is wrong, we would rather fix it in the open.
The short version
On keto, the macro table is the only part of the label that matters. Front-of-pack claims are noise. If you want the verdict without the arithmetic, look the product up and we will show you the carbs per 100g next to the answer.