Ice Cream

What the Data Says About Ice Cream

Ice Cream by Friendly's carries a composite safety score of 70/100, which we classify as "Caution" on our four-tier shelf-label framework.

Of the 19 ingredients parsed from this label, 7 are covered by a regulator or watchdog we screen against (Whey Protein Concentrate, Carrageenan, Blue 1 and 4 others), with 6 carrying an FDA Substances Added to Food (SAFFA) status and 4 a CSPI Chemical Cuisine rating. The remaining 12 ingredients appear in neither registry, so they neither raise nor lower the score. Each additive rated caution-or-worse penalizes the composite. Product data originates from the OpenFoodFacts collaborative catalog; safety annotations come from federal regulators and the Center for Science in the Public Interest. This score is a transparent derived index we compute from that public data, not an official FDA rating or endorsement; see the Methodology page for the exact weighting.

Our scan identified 2 flagged ingredients in this product, components that at least one official source has classified as requiring caution, targeted avoidance, or further evaluation. Flagged ingredients are the items most likely to surface in FDA inspection findings, state-level ingredient bans, or outbreak-related recall notices, so the per-ingredient breakdown below is the most useful lens for anyone screening this product for a specific dietary concern.

On the NOVA processing scale, Ice Cream is classified as Group 4 (Ultra-processed). NOVA measures industrial processing intensity rather than ingredient-level safety, so it complements the SAFFA and CSPI ratings: a product can be clean on additive flags but heavily processed, or lightly processed but carry individually flagged ingredients. Combining both lenses gives a fuller picture than either alone.

How the three scores on this page were derived

The composite for this product falls in the second band of the four-tier framework. That band collects labels whose registry-rated components pull the derived score down measurably without dominating it. Position inside a band is not visible from the band name, and two labels sharing it can differ in how many components were rated and how severely. This is a threshold on an index computed here from public data, not a regulatory classification of any kind; the exact cut-offs are published on the methodology page.

This label falls in the fourth Nutri-Score band. The model arrives there when its penalty terms — energy density, sugars, saturated fat, sodium — carry more weight in the calculation than the fibre, protein and produce content it credits. The band covers a wide span of the points scale, so position within it is not visible from the letter alone. The grade reflects the declared nutrition panel and is unrelated to the additive ratings listed below, which come from different bodies applying different criteria.

A mid-length component list was parsed from this label. There are enough separate entries for the screen to match several independently, while each matched entry still carries visible weight in the resulting index. Lists of this size are the most common shape in the catalogue, which makes the composite here easier to place against comparable products than at either extreme.