Cuban style, black bean and plantain balls

What the Data Says About Cuban style, black bean and plantain balls

Cuban style, black bean and plantain balls by Franklin Farms carries a composite safety score of 100/100, which we classify as "Safe" on our four-tier shelf-label framework.

Of the 35 ingredients parsed from this label, 5 are covered by a regulator or watchdog we screen against (Garlic, Garlic, Sea salt and 2 others), with 2 carrying an FDA Substances Added to Food (SAFFA) status and 3 a CSPI Chemical Cuisine rating. The remaining 30 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 did not identify any ingredients in this product that FDA SAFFA or CSPI Chemical Cuisine data flags as requiring caution or avoidance at the time of analysis. That is a meaningful clean-label signal, though it does not account for personal allergens, regional recalls, or inspection findings not reflected in federal additive databases. The per-ingredient breakdown below shows the source-level classification for each component.

On the NOVA processing scale, Cuban style, black bean and plantain balls 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.

Nutri-Score placed this label in its highest band. The model reaches that grade when the credit side of its ledger — fibre, protein and the fruit, vegetable and legume fraction — outweighs the energy, sugar, saturated-fat and sodium it counts against a product. The scale is computed per hundred grams from the declared nutrition panel, which is why two products with similar ingredients can grade differently on portion-heavy categories. It is a nutritional summary only, calculated independently of the additive registries screened further down this page, and it neither incorporates nor contradicts them.

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.