Within-category comparisons: what the score differences reveal about product quality

Here's something we noticed early on when building the database: in almost every product category, the gap between the worst-scoring and best-scoring option is massive. We're talking 40 to 60 points on a 100-point scale. And these products often sit on the same shelf, at the same price.

Take pasta sauce. We've scored dozens of them. The lowest sits at 29 — high sodium, added sugar, thickeners, and flavour enhancers. The highest is 84 — tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, basil, salt. Similar taste, similar price, wildly different ingredient profiles.

This pattern repeats across the entire supermarket. Breakfast cereals range from 18 to 91. Yoghurts from 22 to 88. Even something as simple as bread spans from the mid-30s to the high 70s depending on the brand.

So we built the alternatives feature around this insight. Scan or search any product and Clera immediately shows you higher-scoring options in the same category. The idea isn't to make you feel bad about your choices. It's to surface options you might not have known about.

We ran the numbers on what happens when people swap just five products in a typical 40-item weekly shop to a higher-scored alternative. The average basket health score improved by 12 points. That doesn't sound dramatic until you think about what's behind those points: less added sugar, fewer questionable additives, more fibre, better quality fats.

Multiply that by 52 weeks and you're looking at a meaningfully different dietary pattern — without changing how you cook, what meals you eat, or how much you spend. That's the leverage of small, well-informed swaps.

The best part is how low-effort it is. You don't need to read every label or understand food science. You just need to check the score and see if there's something better next to it. Usually there is.