PROTEIN BAR

What the Data Says About PROTEIN BAR

PROTEIN BAR by Quest carries a composite safety score of 85/100, which we classify as "Caution" on our four-tier shelf-label framework.

Of the 30 ingredients parsed from this label, 8 are covered by a regulator or watchdog we screen against (Polydextrose, Erythritol, Sodium Caseinate and 5 others), with 6 carrying an FDA Substances Added to Food (SAFFA) status and 5 a CSPI Chemical Cuisine rating. The remaining 22 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, PROTEIN BAR 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.

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.