The whole container, not the panel
On this page11
The measure
Total surface area available to bear labeling. Not the principal display panel, not the information panel, and not a proportion of the label.
Two thresholds
Under 12 square inches, the information in the nutrition label is no smaller than 4.5 point. From 12 to 40 square inches, no smaller than 6 point.
Which is the fifth distinct kind of label rule in this library
The cycling property scales type size with principal display panel area. The hair care property gives a panel a proportion of the label. The topicals property has a flat floor. The beer property bands by container volume and caps characters per inch.
And this one is the only whole-package measure
Which matters because a tall narrow jar and a squat wide one with the same panel can have very different total areas, and the rule follows the total.
It also permits the panel to degrade
Where space is constrained, the hairlines may be omitted and replaced by a row of dots connecting the columns. Most rules set a floor and stop.
So legibility wins over structure
The regulation would rather you kept the type readable and lost the table rules than compressed the type to preserve them.
Our shelf straddles the upper threshold
Side-wall area is computable on 147 of 163 containers, and it runs 12.06 to 84.25 square inches with a median of 33.4.
91 in the band, 56 above it
And none below 12 square inches. So the 40 square inch boundary sits in the middle of this shelf and the 12 square inch one is off the bottom of it.
The smallest clears 12 by six hundredths of an inch
An 88.7 mL PET jar, 2.875 inches across and 1.335 tall, at 12.06 square inches. The same shape of near miss as the cider bottle that clears a standard of fill by 9.764 millilitres.
Our figure is a lower bound
It is the cylinder side wall and the regulation measures more than that. Which is enough to answer whether a container has cleared a band, and that is the question.