No black box.

Food Court does not give a product an overall grade. We report what is on the cited record and let you weigh it.

A single grade would have to invent an exchange rate — how many points a carcinogen is worth versus how it’s processed versus its sugar. No objective source provides that rate; it is a value judgment, not a fact. A vegan and a carnivore don’t disagree that something carries an IARC finding — they disagree about how much it should matter. That “how much” is exactly the number a grade is forced to invent, so we don’t invent it. We show three things separately, each cited, and you apply your own judgment.

Cited harm findings. Documented findings on specific ingredients — from regulators, peer-reviewed science, established institutions, and investigations. Shown most-serious-first, each linking to its source.

Processing. The NOVA classification (from Open Food Facts) — how industrially processed the product is. It describes how a food is made, not a safety finding.

Nutrition. The panel’s high/low flags by the FDA’s %DV (≥20% of a Daily Value = high).

These three never collapse into one symbol. An ultra-processed product with no cited harm finding shows exactly that — a clean harm record and a loud processing signal, side by side, for you to weigh.

Before any of the ordering below runs, Food Court checks whether it actually read the entire ingredient statement — reconciling what it captured against the label’s own punctuation and structure.

If the read is only partial — a blurry photo, a cut-off panel, a statement we couldn’t fully capture — we do not rule. The product shows “still in session”: no verdict, and no coverage percentage, just what we did read. A verdict on a half-read label would be a guess, and a guess is exactly what we refuse to publish. A finding we did read still stands — we simply never imply a label is clean when we haven’t finished reading it.

Within the harm findings, we read the most serious first. A finding’s strength comes from its cited provenance — never our opinion — using a fixed, published weighting:

Parent Mode and allergen flags change what we surface and how we frame it — never what the record says. Parent Mode re-frames a product that already carries a cited finding and foregrounds findings that reference children; it never authors a “safe for kids” judgment. Allergen flags match your list against the label’s own declared allergens — we tell you the label declares something you flagged; we never certify a product is free of anything. The cited findings are identical whether personalization is on or off.