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There are two fields that should be used to account for food loss in labels:
Total Yield: represent the yield of the final prepped dish (after any food loss)
Yield after cooking: defines where the food loss comes from
Yield and yield after cooking go hand in hand. For the nutrition label to be accurate, both fields should be adjusted.
The rule of thumb is: you define how much food loss there is via the total yield, and you define where that food loss is coming from via the yield after cooking.
To understand this better, let's look at an example. We have a recipe for "Pickled Beets Salad" that uses the below "Pickled Beets" recipe:
Note that the above does not account for food loss. The recipe yield is 7.89 pounds, which is the sum of the weights of all the ingredients in the recipe. And the nutrition “Yield after cooking” is set to 100% for all ingredients. Why is that incorrect? Because this recipe includes the ingredients of the pickling brine (sugar, vinegar) which we dispose of once the pickling process is done.
To fix that, we start by adjusting the recipe yield. The weight of the pickling brine is ~2.89 pounds, but let's assume that around 10% of it is not disposed of. The recipe yield should then be the weight of the beets (5 pounds) + 10% of the weight of the brine: total weight of ~5.29 pounds.
Note that after adjusting the yield, the nutrition label changed. The original label showed calories as 340 whereas the above label shows calories as 510. The reason for that is that the nutrition label is not yet accounting for food loss. The serving size for pickled beets is 1 pound:
The original recipe had a yield of 7.8 pounds: which is ~8 servings
The adjusted recipe has a yield of 5.29 lb: which is ~6 servings
Without accounting for the food loss on the nutrition side, less servings means bigger servings which means more calories. Think about it this way: assume a whole cake has 500 calories. If you cut it to 10 slices - each slice will have 50 calories. But if you cut it to 5 slices instead - each slice will have 100 calories. Fewer servings = higher calories per serving.
To fix that, we need to update the nutrition calculations to account for the same food loss the recipe yield was adjusted for. We do that by adjusting the “Yield after cooking”:
We dispose of 90% of the pickling brine - meaning that the nutrition label should only account for the 10% of the brine that remains. To do that, we set the "Yield after cooking" of vinegar, sugar, and the picking spice to 10%. We do not have any loss when it comes to the beets, so the beets’ yield after cooking remains 100%.
Note that after adjusting yield after cooking, the nutrition label changed again. This time calories went down from 510 to 220. The reason calories are now lower than the initial 340 is because the majority of the calories come from sugar, 90% of which is now excluded from the label.
Pro tip: if you enable auto calculate total yield on the recipe, the recipe yield will automatically adjust when you adjust yield after cooking for an ingredient. Use that to save the time of manually calculating the recipe yield.
When using a recipe in other recipes, remember that the same logic described above applies. For example: if you call for 1 serving of Pickled Beets (i.e: 1 pound) on the parent recipe Beets Salad - the nutrition values on the parent will be identical to the nutrition value of the child recipe as long as there is no food loss (i.e: recipe yield is the sum of the weights of the ingredients, and yield after cooking is 100%).