Half & Half

What the Data Says About Half & Half

Half & Half by Polar Corporation carries a composite safety score of 75/100, which we classify as "Caution" on our four-tier shelf-label framework.

Of the 15 ingredients parsed from this label, 4 are covered by a regulator or watchdog we screen against (Brominated Vegetable Oil, Potassium Benzoate, High-fructose corn syrup and 1 other), with 3 carrying an FDA Substances Added to Food (SAFFA) status and 3 a CSPI Chemical Cuisine rating. The remaining 11 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, Half & Half 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.

Nutri-Score is not defined for this product's category. The model excludes certain categories by design — among them plain waters, herbs, teas and coffees, and some single-ingredient products — rather than attempting a grade and failing. No nutritional band therefore accompanies the additive screen on this page, and its absence is a property of the category rather than a finding about this particular label. The registry screen below is unaffected by the exclusion and covers additive ratings as normal.

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.