Yesterday, a concern was raised that calorie information was required for recipes to be included in or to rank well for Google Search. This is not the case. Moreover, structured data like this has no impact on ranking in web search. This thread has more we hope eases concerns...
Content owners can provide structured data as an *optional* way to enhance their web page listings. It has no impact on ranking. Using it may simply help pages that already rank well appear more attractive to potential visitors: developers.google.com/search/docs/gu…
With recipes, providing calorie information through structured data may then show those calories as part of the recipe’s web page listing, as can be seen below. You can also see how recipes may appear with no calorie info or any structured data at all…. 
Aside from web page listings, Google Search may have some special features where certain basic structured data is required to be eligible to appear, such as carousels. For recipe carousels, calorie info is still not required....
developers.google.com/search/docs/da…
developers.google.com/search/docs/da…
Now to the source of confusion on this issue. Search Console is a free tool Google provides. It’s designed to help content producers do better in Search, including suggesting possible improvements or catching possible oversights with content in search….
search.google.com/search-console…
search.google.com/search-console…
One of our standard Search Console improvement messages shown below caused a content producer to believe calorie info was required to be in Google Search. We apologize for the concern caused. Our wording should have been much clearer to indicate this was an optional suggestion…
Our goal with these types of messages is to help content producers understand if there are opportunities they’re missing. We’ll be reviewing the wording of these messages to better achieve that goal and not inadvertently cause concerns.
