So I bought some canned sardines from Aldi’s.
I eat a fairly set diet (except when I cheat and have Chick-fil-A), so I’ll usually eat the same things on the same days. For example, I have ground turkey with dinner every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Because I’m an autistic fuck I use a spreadsheet to keep track of my calories and macros. I have two spreadsheets. One is my daily eating itinerary, so I know what I’m eating on what day, and the other is to store nutritional information for stuff I commonly eat, so I can just go copy and paste from there when I build my diets.
I wanted to add sardines to my diet for breakfast two days a week, so I pulled up my nutritional log to get the calorie and macro info for Aldi canned sardines… Only to discover that I never logged them.
No big deal, right? I can just grab one of the cans I bought and get the information from there, right?
So I grabbed a can of sardines, only to discover this:
There’s no nutritional information on the package.
What the actual fuck?!
I worked in a grocery store as a manager for nine years, so I’m at least somewhat familiar with labeling laws. You’re not allowed to sell a product without nutritional information on it. This shit is regulated by the FDA, it’s mandated by federal law.
Then I looked closer at the packaging:
“Please write us for nutritional information?” There’s no way that’s legal.
Thinking I could become the next tuna lawsuit guy, I went to the internet to do a little research. If I was about to use the legal system to net millions of dollars from Aldi’s fuck-up, I had to make sure my ducks were in order first.
As it turns out, labeling laws allow companies to not include nutritional information on their packaging for a couple of reasons. One reason is if the packaging is considered “too small”. This obviously doesn’t apply here, the can of sardines has plenty of room.
Another exemption is if the company who sold the sardines to Aldi is selling less than 100,000 units to Aldi in the United States. Again, I’m calling bullshit here, because half the time I go to buy sardines in water at any Aldi they’re sold out. I’ve heard this is common across the US. There’s no way American Aldi’s aren’t moving more than 100,000 units of sardines in water a year. Unless Aldi has 20 different sardine suppliers, each supplying less than 100,000 cans a year, this exemption shouldn’t apply either.
You might be thinking, “AJ, stop bitching and just get the info on Google!” Great, except the info on Google is all over the place:
Those are some fairly big discrepancies.
Obviously I’m not so autistic that I’m stressing over 100 calories, but it’s the principle of the matter. There’s plenty of room on the can for a nutrition label, so why isn’t there one? Nobody is going to write a letter to Aldi asking for the info (which, if Google is anything to go by, may or may not be accurate). Who even still writes and mails letters to companies in 2026? Even Granny Ethel knows how to use email now. A stamp costs 78 cents. A can of sardines costs a little over $1. I’m not spending an extra dollar to wait several months to receive a letter with the nutritional facts on a can of sardines bro.
How much money are they actually saving by skipping labeling these cans anyway? It probably costs them like 1 cent per can to slap a nutrition label on there. Aldi is literally pinching pennies at this point while inconveniencing customers.
Aldi, stop being a bunch of cheap bastards and label your fucking sardine cans.
