US Grocery Category Safety Scores
Data vintage: August 2, 2026 · 8 rows · CC BY 4.0
This dataset gives the average ingredient-flag safety score and the share of products carrying a flagged additive for the 8 largest US grocery categories. Sweet snacks scores lowest at 79.6/100 (Moderate-High), with 34.3% of its 54,315 products carrying at least one flagged additive.
Provenance chain
- Upstream: Open Food Facts. Product records, category assignments and ingredient lists are theirs and remain licensed under ODbL.
- Each ingredient is matched against FDA SAFFA regulatory status and CSPI Chemical Cuisine ratings to produce a per-product flag count, then a 0-100 score. That matching and scoring is ours. See methodology.
- Scores are averaged per category over catalogued products, and the concern label is a band over that average, not a separate judgement.
Columns
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| name | Open Food Facts category name |
| product_count | Catalogued products carrying the category |
| avg_score | Mean PlainFoodSafe ingredient-flag score for those products, 0-100 |
| pct_flagged | Share of the category’s products carrying at least one flagged additive |
| concern_level | Banded label derived from avg_score (Minimal / Low / Moderate / Moderate-High) |
What this dataset does not establish
- The score counts flagged ingredients. It is not a health assessment, a nutrition rating, or a claim that any product is unsafe to eat.
- Category averages hide wide within-category variation: every category here contains both flagged and unflagged products.
- Open Food Facts categories are contributor-assigned and overlap, so a product can sit in more than one category and coverage differs between them.
- A flagged additive is one carrying an FDA SAFFA entry or a CSPI caution rating. Those are third-party assessments reproduced with attribution, not PlainFoodSafe opinions.
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