Which foods are highest in riboflavin (B2)?
3 oz of Chicken, liver, all classes, cooked gives 1.69 mg of riboflavin (B2). That is 130% of the Daily Value, and it is the highest of the 1000 foods on this site that has not been fortified.
Share of the Daily Value (1.3 mg) in one portion.
| Food | Portion | Amount | % DV |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chicken, liver, all classes, cooked | 3 oz (85 g) | 1.69 mg | 130% |
| Almonds, dry roasted | 1 cup whole kernels (138 g) | 1.65 mg | 127% |
| Almonds, oil roasted | 1 cup whole kernels (157 g) | 1.23 mg | 94% |
| Frankfurter, meatless fortified | 1 cup, sliced (140 g) | 1.17 mg | 90% |
| Almonds, blanched | 1 cup whole kernels (145 g) | 1.03 mg | 79% |
| Corn flour, masa, white fortified | 1 cup (114 g) | 0.92 mg | 71% |
| Chicken, giblets, cooked, simmered | 3 oz (85 g) | 0.89 mg | 69% |
| Mixed nuts, oil roasted, without peanuts | 1 cup (144 g) | 0.7 mg | 54% |
| Egg, whole, cooked, hard-boiled | 1 cup, chopped (136 g) | 0.7 mg | 54% |
| Bacon, meatless fortified | 1 cup (144 g) | 0.69 mg | 53% |
This ranking is per typical portion rather than per 100 g. Lists built per 100 g end up full of dried herbs and fortified bars, which is technically correct and practically useless, because nobody sits down to 100 g of thyme. Items marked fortified rank where they do because nutrients were added during manufacture, not because the food itself is rich in them.
What this means for you
Riboflavin follows dairy around. Milk, yogurt, cheese, eggs, meat, liver and fortified grain carry most of what people get, and the requirement is small, 1.3 mg a day for men and 1.1 mg for women. A large glass of milk and a couple of eggs will do most of it.
Almonds are the surprise in this table, and they are the practical answer for anyone avoiding dairy. So are mushrooms, fortified plant drinks and nutritional yeast. Vegans and people who dropped milk without replacing it are the two groups most likely to run low in a wealthy country, and vegetarian athletes are named separately because training raises the need.
The migraine question
Riboflavin is sold in doses a hundred times the daily requirement for migraine prevention, and the trials there are better than the usual shrug suggests.
Unsettled. Pooling 22 randomised trials of supplements for migraine, riboflavin cut attacks by about one and a third a month. An earlier review of 11 trials found the effect holds in adults and is mixed in children, and two small randomised studies in children found no change in either the number of headaches or their severity. So the same bottle is a fair try for an adult and a poor bet for a ten-year-old.
The deficiency has a look that doctors recognise: cracks at the corners of the mouth, sore lips and a swollen, inflamed tongue. It rarely arrives alone, because the diets that leave someone short of riboflavin usually leave them short of other B vitamins too.
Light is the thing that takes it, not heat
Riboflavin is the vitamin daylight destroys. It breaks down in ordinary visible light, and faster as the food gets warmer or less acidic. It is most stable in the dark at a pH of 3.5 to 4. That makes milk in a clear bottle on a doorstep a different food from the same milk in a carton, which is one of the few places where packaging genuinely changes what you eat.
Established. Water takes a share too, and this one has a fix. Boiling costs roughly twice as much riboflavin as steaming or microwaving the same food, because the vitamin leaves into the cooking water rather than being destroyed by the heat. Steam it, microwave it, or keep the water and use it. Nothing about the food has to change.
The richest food and the one that actually feeds you
Liver sits at the top of any table of riboflavin concentration, and it is not where most people's riboflavin comes from. In the American diet the largest actual contributors are milk and milk drinks, bread and bread products, meat-based mixed dishes and ready-to-eat cereal. Grains are fortified in the United States and many other countries, which is why bread appears on a list it has no natural business being on.
One chemical detail explains part of the table. Most riboflavin in food arrives bound up as FAD. Eggs and milk are the exception and carry the free form. Either way, about 95 per cent of what is in food is available to you, and riboflavin from whole food is absorbed better than riboflavin from a tablet, 60 to 70 per cent against 50 to 60.
Written from the evidence cards and the data on this page, then checked back against the sources. Bioma Learn has no human medical reviewer at this time and we say so rather than invent one. Information, not medical advice. How we verify.
Full guide: Riboflavin: a milk and egg vitamin, and what the migraine trials really show
Data: USDA FoodData Central. % Daily Value against the FDA DV of 1.3 mg. Checked 2026-09-15.