Editorial & Corrections Policy

PlainFoodSafe publishes an additive-safety profile for hundreds of thousands of food products and the additives they contain — built entirely from public data. This page explains how those pages are produced, what standards they are held to, and how to report a number that looks wrong so we can fix it at the source.

How these pages are produced

Every safety score, ingredient list, NOVA processing level, and flagged-additive count on PlainFoodSafe is computed from a public dataset. We load the source data through a documented, version-controlled data pipeline and render it into product, ingredient, brand, state, and ranking pages using shared templates. No product or additive page is hand-written, and no safety score is typed in by an editor — each figure is computed by the same documented algorithm and read from the source record at build time.

Our editorial team is responsible for the parts a pipeline cannot decide on its own: which datasets to use, how the safety score is defined and labeled, what the methodology says, how derived measures (such as the share of ultra-processed products or an additive's prevalence) are computed, which guides and research pages we write, and what we will not publish. The pipeline then applies those decisions uniformly across every product, so the rule that governs one page governs all of them.

Sourcing standards

We publish only data that comes from public sources, and we name the source on every data page. Our data is:

• Open Food Facts: the collaborative, open product catalogue — product names, brands, barcodes, ingredient lists, and NOVA processing classifications. It is the source for every product page and ingredient occurrence count.
• FDA Substances Added to Food (SAFFA): the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's regulatory inventory of substances added to food — the source for each additive's federal regulatory status.
• CSPI Chemical Cuisine: the Center for Science in the Public Interest's independent additive safety ratings (Safe, Caution, Cut Back, Certain People Should Avoid, Avoid), based on published toxicological and epidemiological research.
• US state additive restrictions: the public record of state-level food-additive laws (such as California's AB 418 and the wave of state synthetic-dye bills), used for the state regulation pages.

We do not scrape third-party review sites, we do not republish self-reported ratings as our own, and we do not invent our own laboratory results. The composite safety score is a transparent derivation from the regulatory status of a product's labeled ingredients; exactly how it is calculated is set out in our methodology.

Accuracy and validation

Because the data is computed straight from the source tables, the most common limitation is the underlying data itself rather than a transcription error. Open Food Facts is community-contributed, so a product's ingredient list reflects what a contributor last recorded — which may lag the current physical label. Our pipeline applies systematic checks before a value is published: it computes a score only from labeled ingredients it can map, shows a value as unavailable when the source omits it, and reconciles product, ingredient, and brand rollups so the same figure is consistent wherever it appears.

When we find that a displayed number is wrong, we fix the cause, not the symptom. We trace the value back to the data layer, correct the derivation or labeling rule there, and regenerate the affected pages, so the same class of error is resolved everywhere at once rather than patched on a single page.

Editorial independence

PlainFoodSafe does not accept payment, sponsorship, or promoted placement from any manufacturer, brand, retailer, or food-industry organization in exchange for how a product is presented. Our only revenue source is contextual display advertising served by Google AdSense. Advertisers have no influence over which products we cover, how a safety score is computed, or how any page ranks.

Update schedule

Open Food Facts is updated continuously by its contributors, and additive regulatory status and ratings change as regulators and CSPI revise them. We refresh our database periodically from the latest source exports and re-stamp the affected pages so the published date reflects when the data genuinely changed.

Corrections process

If a figure looks wrong, please tell us. We treat data-error reports as a priority and follow the same process every time:

1. Report. Email hello@plainfoodsafe.com with the page URL and the figure you are questioning.
2. Verify. We check the value against the source record (Open Food Facts, FDA SAFFA, or CSPI) for that product or additive.
3. Fix at the source. If the figure is wrong on our side, we correct the underlying data or derivation rule and regenerate every page it affects.
4. Note it. If the figure is correct but reflects a known limitation — a community-contributed ingredient list, an unrated additive, or a missing label — we explain the caveat rather than silently changing it.

Some apparent errors trace back to the source dataset itself. When that is the case, we will tell you so and, where possible, point you to the official source so you can verify it directly.

Contact

Questions about our standards, methodology, or a specific figure are welcome at hello@plainfoodsafe.com. For more on what the data covers and how it is processed, see our About page and methodology. For how to use this information responsibly, see our disclaimer.