Food Scorecard database ranks grocery ingredients & nutrition 

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Hey, it’s a start! With proper partnerships and collaboration – it could be a useful data-layer to fuel better decision making.

An environmental research organization on Monday introduced one of the most comprehensive online databases of food products, containing information on more than 80,000 items sold in groceries across the nation. It offers details of ingredients and nutritional information as well as an attempt to assess how processed the food items are.

“We know that consumers care a lot about what’s in the foods they buy, and we also know that if foods are highly processed, that can have an impact on nutrition in ways that don’t always show up on the information panels on labels,” said Renée Sharp, the director of research at the Environmental Working Group, the nonprofit group that built the new service.

The Food Scores database, compiled largely from information supplied by food companies through voluntary and mandatory labeling, combined with the group’s own research on pesticides and additives, allows consumers to find information like how many products contain brominated vegetable oil as an ingredient or whether a specific product contains added dyes and preservatives.

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