Top 10 Food Brands by Aggregate Product Safety Score
Food brands in the Open Food Facts catalog ranked by aggregate safety score across their products, weighted by product count and flagged additives.
Research period:
Research question
Among brands with sufficient product depth in the Open Food Facts catalog, how do aggregate brand-level safety scores distribute, and which brands rank lowest on the flagged-additive-prevalence metric?
Methodology
This ranking reflects the data currently in our database, sourced from the agency referenced in the citation below and updated automatically as new filings are processed.
Coverage and exclusions: the source agency occasionally suppresses values for confidentiality, small sample size, or quality control, and suppressed rows are excluded from this ranking rather than shown as zero. If the agency later revises a figure, the revised value replaces the old one automatically the next time our data is refreshed.
Data provenance: we pull each release as it becomes available and normalize it into our database; a later release simply supersedes the one before it, so readers never see a mix of old and new figures on the same page.
Comparability across years: when the source agency revises its release schedule, definitions, or coverage, we note the affected years on the methodology page so readers can compare like-with-like rather than across a changed measurement.
Editorial governance: a named editor reviews every ranking page before publication (see the byline above). If an entity disputes a figure attributed to it, corrections are checked against the official source record before any change is made.
Every number on this page can be traced back to its source by following the entity links and the citation below, so independent verification never requires anything beyond the original public source.
See the methodology page for the complete ETL pipeline, source vintage, and column lineage.
Top 10 Food Brands by Aggregate Product Safety Score
Live data: reflects the current dataset
The ranked top
Every row below reflects the current 10-record dataset. Reload the page after new data is processed to see the latest values.
| # | Brand | Products in catalog | Scored (has ingredient list) | Avg safety score | Flagged products % | Dye pledge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bob's Red Mill | 551 | 498 | 100 | 0.4% | |
| 2 | Kind | 511 | 328 | 100 | 0.0% | |
| 3 | Nature Valley | 492 | 277 | 100 | 0.0% | |
| 4 | Clif | 317 | 229 | 100 | 0.0% | |
| 5 | Beech-Nut | 242 | 226 | 100 | 0.0% | |
| 6 | Organic Valley | 240 | 193 | 100 | 0.5% | |
| 7 | Woodstock | 231 | 176 | 100 | 0.0% | |
| 8 | Cadia | 263 | 167 | 100 | 0.0% | |
| 9 | Vega | 231 | 162 | 100 | 0.0% | |
| 10 | Häagen-Dazs | 202 | 155 | 100 | 0.0% |
Source: Open Food Facts contributors + FDA + CSPI, Open Food Facts product catalogue with FDA and CSPI overlay. Values reflect the current dataset, refreshed as new filings are processed. Open Food Facts contributors + FDA + CSPI, Open Food Facts product catalogue with FDA and CSPI overlay. Values reflect the current dataset, refreshed as new filings are processed.
Findings
Top entity in the ranking
1,386 of the 3,829 qualifying brands share the highest average safety score, 100.0, so this ranking has no single leader. Bob's Red Mill appears first only because ties are broken by the number of scored products, not because it scores better than the others at the top. Read the table as "brands at the ceiling", not as first place. The full top-10 set is rendered in the table above. Every value comes directly from the current dataset; no number is hardcoded into this page. When the source agency publishes a revision, the ranking and the prose around it update automatically.
Distribution shape
Every brand in the visible set scores 100.0, so this cut has no spread at all to describe. The score is bounded at that value and a large share of qualifying brands reach it, which means it separates the ceiling from everything below but cannot rank the brands sitting on it. A brand can reach the ceiling while still carrying a small share of flagged products, so treat it as a pass mark rather than a fine-grained ordering. The full distribution beyond this top-10 cut is summarized in the aggregate context section below and explored in the linked entity profiles.
Aggregate context
3,829 brands qualify for this ranking, meaning they carry at least 10 scored products and a computed average safety score. Their mean average score is 93.4, and 1,386 of them sit at the maximum of 100.0. Brands below the scored-product threshold are excluded because an average taken over a handful of products is not comparable with one taken over hundreds. The methodology page documents the exact filter; this aggregate is computed from the same dataset that powers the ranking above.
Source provenance
The records in this ranking originate from Open Food Facts contributors + FDA + CSPI, specifically the Open Food Facts product catalogue with FDA and CSPI overlay. PlainFoodSafe ingests the source vintage published by the agency and keeps this page current, there is no static export carrying stale numbers, and a newly published dataset is reflected here within hours. The methodology page documents the source URL, the vintage date, and the steps applied to prepare the data.
Why this ranking matters
Rankings like this one let a reader scan a population quickly and identify outliers, concentrations, and patterns that warrant deeper investigation. The detail pages linked from each entity in the table above give the full per-entity context: time-series history where available, related metrics from adjacent tables, and links onward to the underlying source records. The methodology page explains how an entity earns inclusion in the dataset and how the ranking column is computed at the source.
What this analysis cannot tell us
Brand-level safety scores aggregate product-level safety scores, which in turn are computed from the additive composition of each product's ingredient list as recorded in the Open Food Facts public database. A high score does not indicate a brand is 'safe' in any medical or nutritional sense, it indicates that, among the products contributors have catalogued for that brand, the ingredient lists are predominantly free of additives currently flagged by CSPI or under FDA regulatory action. A low score indicates the opposite. Open Food Facts is contributor-built; brand coverage breadth varies, and a brand with a small product count in the catalog may not be representative of its full product portfolio. This page is informational and aggregation-only, not a brand endorsement or condemnation.
Secondary cut from the same source
Top 10 brands (50+ products) by highest flagged-additive prevalence
Sources
- Open Food Facts, public product ingredient database (CC0) - https://world.openfoodfacts.org/
- Center for Science in the Public Interest, Chemical Cuisine ratings - https://www.cspi.org/page/chemical-cuisine-food-additive-safety-ratings
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Food Additive Status List - https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/food-additive-status-list
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