How the label checks work

The five checks

A food fails a check when its ingredient list names any one of that check’s ingredients, even once and even in the “contains 2% or less” part of the list. These are the complete lists; nothing else counts.

How a mark is made

Nobody marks a food by hand. A small program reads the ingredient text and matches it against the wordings each ingredient goes by on a label: “Red 40”, “FD&C Red No. 40” and “Red 40 Lake” are all Red 40; “soybean and/or canola oil” counts both oils. Each ingredient page spells out the wordings it accepts. The words that matched are printed on the food’s page beside the mark, and highlighted in the full ingredient list, so any mark can be checked against the label in a few seconds.

The same program re-reads every food each time the list is rebuilt, so a corrected label is re-marked by the same rules as everything else, and two foods with the same wording always get the same marks.

How lists are ordered

Every list puts the foods that fail the fewest checks first. Ties are broken by the number of flagged ingredients (a cereal with four dyes comes after one with a single dye), then alphabetically. That is the only ordering on the site: no food is placed higher because of who makes it, and nothing here is paid for.

Where the ingredient lists come from

From the maker’s own product page where it prints the ingredients (429 foods), and otherwise from the label the maker filed with USDA’s FoodData Central branded food database (468 foods). Only USDA records filed in 2024 or later are used, and records marked discontinued are skipped. Every food page links the exact source.

Before a food goes on the list, its ingredient text is compared with a saved copy of that source; an entry that does not match is rejected rather than fixed by hand. Where the maker’s page and the USDA record disagree about a dye, sweetener, oil or preservative, the maker’s page wins and the food page says what changed.

Known limits

• Labels differ. The same food can carry a different list in another pack size, a club-store pack, a seasonal version or a regional plant, and recipes change over time. The pack in your hand is the final word.
• “Vegetable oil” with no name. Some labels say only “vegetable oil”. That fails the seed-oil check as vegetable oil (not named), because it gives no way to rule a seed oil out (13 foods).
• “Artificial color” with no name. Counted as artificial color (not named) unless the same label names a dye, in which case only the named dye is counted (5 foods).
• Either-or lists count every option. “Canola and/or sunflower oil” means the maker may use either, so both are flagged.
• A pass is about five lists only. It says nothing about sugar, salt, calories, how processed a food is, or any ingredient outside the five checks.

Not counted, on purpose

These appear on many labels and are left out of every check:

• Caramel colornot one of the listed dyes
• Colors from fruit, vegetables or spicesbeet juice, annatto, turmeric, spirulina
• Natural flavors and artificial flavorsflavors are not a check
• Palm, palm kernel and coconut oilnot seed oils by this list
• Olive, avocado, peanut and sesame oilnot seed oils by this list
• Stevia, monk fruit and sugar alcoholsnot artificial sweeteners by this list
• Sugar, cane sugar, honey and other syrupsonly corn syrups count
• Other preservativescitric acid, sorbates, benzoates, nitrites

Soy lecithin and corn starch are not oils and are not counted. Brominated vegetable oil is counted once, under the preservatives check, not as a seed oil.