Hojicha

What the Data Says About Hojicha

Hojicha by Sugimoto Tea carries a composite safety score of 100/100, which we classify as "Safe" on our four-tier shelf-label framework.

None of the 2 ingredients parsed from this label appears in FDA Substances Added to Food (SAFFA) or CSPI Chemical Cuisine. That is an absence of evidence rather than a clean bill: the registries catalogue additives, so whole-food and unlisted components fall outside them and cannot be scored either way. 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, Hojicha is classified as Group 1 (Unprocessed). 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.

The Nutri-Score algorithm returned its second band for this label. That grade typically describes a nutrition panel whose favourable components register clearly in the model without fully offsetting its energy or sodium terms. Because the calculation is a single points balance rather than a set of independent thresholds, a strong fibre or protein figure can lift a panel into this band even where one penalised nutrient sits high. The grade summarises the declared panel alone and carries no information about the additive ratings screened below.

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.