Sweet tea

What the Data Says About Sweet tea

Sweet tea by Southern Breeze has no safety score because the source record has no usable ingredient list. There is no reliable ingredient screen to compute from and no shelf-label classification is assigned.

Of the 2 ingredients parsed from this label, 1 is covered by a regulator or watchdog we screen against (Sucralose), with 1 carrying an FDA Substances Added to Food (SAFFA) status and 1 a CSPI Chemical Cuisine rating. The remaining 1 ingredient 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.

No usable food ingredient list is available for this product in the Open Food Facts collaborative database: the source record has no usable ingredient list. No scan against FDA SAFFA or CSPI Chemical Cuisine data could be performed and no score is assigned. Missing or unparseable evidence is not a clean-label signal -- check the product's physical packaging or the manufacturer's site for its actual ingredient list.

On the NOVA processing scale, Sweet tea 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 settled on its middle grade here, the band the algorithm produces when the penalty and credit sides of its nutrient ledger come out close to balanced. A mid-scale grade is a statement about the panel as a whole rather than about any single nutrient, and products arrive at it by very different routes: a moderate profile across every term, or high marks on some offset by heavy penalties on others. The grade is computed separately from the ingredient screen below and the two are not comparable measures.

The declared list parsed into a small number of components. On a short list the registry screen covers close to everything the packaging declares, and any single matched component accounts for a correspondingly large share of the composite. Short lists also leave less room for parsing error, since there are fewer separators and qualifiers for the extraction to resolve.