Editorial standards

Last updated September 21, 2026 · By the Foodmetria editorial team · how we work

Foodmetria publishes two very different kinds of pages, and we hold them to different rules: pages computed from open data, and guides written by people. This page explains how each is produced, where the facts come from, and how we fix mistakes.

Who writes Foodmetria

Foodmetria is an independent publisher, not a brand, a retailer or an industry body. We publish under a single editorial byline rather than individual names, and we'd rather you didn't take our word for anything: every factual claim in our written guides is tied to a named primary source, linked, dated, and checkable in one click. A link you can open is worth more than a name you can't verify.

We are not a medical service. Nothing on Foodmetria is medical, dietary or clinical advice, and no page is a substitute for reading the label or talking to a professional who knows your situation.

Two kinds of pages

Data pages: Product pages, categories, brands, rankings and comparisons. These are generated from the Open Food Facts database and recalculated daily. No one writes them by hand. What we add is arithmetic — category averages, percentiles, nutrient levels, % Daily Value — and the formulas are documented in how we score. A data page is published only when it passes our quality thresholds; thin or nonsensical ones are kept out of search results rather than padded with text.
Written guides: Additive guides and explainers such as Nutri-Score and ultra-processed food. These make claims about safety, regulation and research, so they follow the rules below.

Where facts come from

For anything touching health or regulation we use primary sources, in this order:

Regulators and intergovernmental bodies — the US Food and Drug Administration and the Code of Federal Regulations, the European Food Safety Authority, JECFA and the World Health Organization, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, USDA and HHS, and the text of statutes.
Peer-reviewed research, cited with a DOI. Systematic reviews and randomized trials carry more weight than single observational studies, and we say which is which in the text: animal studies are called animal studies, observational studies are called observational, laboratory work is called in vitro.
The source data itself — counts, averages and shares we quote about products are computed from our own copy of Open Food Facts and can be reproduced from it.

Trade press, news coverage and blogs are used only to find primary sources. They don't appear in our reference lists, with one exception: a chronology of regulatory decisions where no public primary record exists, which we mark as such.

How a guide gets published

A draft is prepared, with AI assistance, from the primary sources listed for the page.
Every claim, number and date in it is then checked against the source it cites — each reference is opened and read, not just linked. Regulatory status is re-confirmed on the day of publication, because it moves quickly.
Anything that cannot be confirmed is removed or softened until it can be. A verification log is written for each page recording what was checked, what couldn't be opened, and what was used to confirm it instead.
Only then does the page go live and become eligible for search engines.

We publish this openly because the alternative — an invented author and a silent process — is exactly what we'd want to check for on someone else's site. The safeguard that matters is not who typed the sentence; it is whether the sentence survives its source.

We do not have a registered dietitian on staff. Where an external reviewer has checked a page, their name and credentials appear on it; where that field is empty, no one external has reviewed it, and we leave it empty rather than implying otherwise.

What we won't publish

Claims we couldn't trace to a primary source.
Alarm as a substitute for evidence. An additive being permitted, reviewed or restricted are three different statements, and we use the one that is true.
A single study reported as settled science, or a preliminary finding stripped of its caveats.
Health advice aimed at an individual, diagnoses, or claims that a product treats or prevents anything.

Review dates

Every written guide shows when it was last checked, and that date changes only when someone has actually re-read the sources. Regulatory pages are re-checked on a schedule because their subject moves: as one example, the FDA's voluntary phase-out date for petroleum-based colorants shifted from the end of 2026 to the end of 2027, and pages citing it were corrected. When a status changes we rewrite the page and record what changed and when, rather than quietly overwriting it.

Corrections

We correct errors promptly, in public, and we distinguish two cases:

Wrong product data: Nutrition values, ingredients, allergens, photos and brand names come from Open Food Facts, a database anyone can edit. The fastest and most durable fix is to correct it at the source — every product page links to its Open Food Facts entry — and the correction reaches Foodmetria within a day or two. Tell us as well if you'd like us to check it.
Something we wrote: If a guide is wrong, we fix the text, update the review date and note what changed. If the error changed the meaning of the page, the note says so explicitly. Write to [email protected] with the page address and, where you can, the source that contradicts us — that is the fastest route to a fix.

We also remove reviews that are spam, advertising, or not based on personal experience. See contact for how to report one.

Independence and funding

No one can pay to change a score, enter a ranking, be removed from one, or have a review published, reordered or deleted. Scores are computed the same way for every product by the same code, and we couldn't make an exception for a brand without changing the formula for everyone.

As of September 2026, Foodmetria carries no advertising and no affiliate links, and takes no payment from food manufacturers. If that changes, paid or commission-earning links will be labelled as such on the page where they appear, and they will remain outside the scoring and ranking logic entirely. We will say so here before it happens, not after.

Known limits

Product data is contributed by volunteers. It can be incomplete, out of date, or wrong for a particular package, and coverage is much better for some markets than others.
An empty field is not evidence of absence. A missing allergen list means we don't know — never that the allergen is absent — and our pages say so rather than guessing.
Manufacturers reformulate without notice. The label in your hand outranks anything on this site.
Nutri-Score and NOVA are public systems with published methods and real limitations; we explain what each one does and does not measure rather than presenting either as a verdict.