Steak Sauce

What the Data Says About Steak Sauce

Steak Sauce by H-E-B carries a composite safety score of 95/100, which we classify as "Safe" on our four-tier shelf-label framework.

Of the 28 ingredients parsed from this label, 10 are covered by a regulator or watchdog we screen against (Sodium Benzoate, Caramel Coloring, High-fructose corn syrup and 7 others), with 7 carrying an FDA Substances Added to Food (SAFFA) status and 8 a CSPI Chemical Cuisine rating. The remaining 18 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 1 flagged ingredient 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, Steak Sauce 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

Within the four-tier shelf-label framework this site publishes, the composite for this product falls in the highest band. That band is defined by a threshold on the derived score alone: it is where labels land once components carrying caution-or-worse registry ratings contribute little or nothing to the deduction. The band is a summary of what the screened registries return for the components that were parsed, so it inherits their coverage gaps — a component absent from both registries neither raises nor lowers the figure. The threshold and the weighting behind it are set out on the methodology page.

No Nutri-Score grade is present for this record in the OpenFoodFacts snapshot this page is built from. The nutritional dimension is absent rather than assessed and withheld: the grade depends on a complete declared nutrition panel, and community-contributed records vary in how much of that panel they carry. Nothing about the missing grade implies anything either way about the panel itself. The screen below covers additive ratings only and does not depend on the nutrition figures.

This label parsed into a long component list. Where many entries are screened at once, the composite tends to reflect the overall mix of registry ratings returned rather than the rating of any one entry. Longer declarations also carry more sub-listed and compound entries, where a parenthetical group is resolved into its parts, so the parsed count can exceed what a reader counts on the packaging.