How Clera scores products: a transparent look at our 0–100 health rating

People ask us all the time: how do you actually come up with the number? It's a fair question. If you're going to trust a score enough to change what goes in your trolley, you deserve to know what's behind it.

Every product in our database gets a score between 0 and 100. That score comes from a model we built in-house that looks at four things: the quality of the ingredients, whether any additives raise flags, the nutritional profile, and how heavily the product has been processed.

Ingredients are the foundation. We maintain a database of thousands of individual ingredients, each classified according to what the research says about them. That research comes from FSANZ, the European Food Safety Authority, and peer-reviewed journals. Some ingredients — whole grains, legumes, quality fats — push the score up. Others — hydrogenated oils, certain artificial colours, high-fructose corn syrup — pull it down.

Additives get their own layer. Not all additives are bad. Ascorbic acid is just vitamin C. But some emulsifiers, some preservatives, and certain synthetic colours have enough evidence of concern that we flag them separately. You can see these flags when you tap into any product in the app.

Nutritional profiling is the third factor. We look at sugar, sodium, saturated fat, fibre, and protein. But context matters — the acceptable range for a condiment is different from a breakfast cereal. So we weight these relative to the product's category.

Processing level rounds it out. We draw on the NOVA framework here, but it's not the only input. A product can be moderately processed and still score well if everything else checks out. We don't penalise processing for its own sake — we penalise it when it correlates with worse ingredients and nutrition.

One important detail: scores are category-relative. A 75 for a pasta sauce means it's among the better pasta sauces, not that it competes with raw vegetables. This keeps comparisons meaningful — you're always comparing apples to apples, or at least chips to chips.

We update scores when formulations change. If a brand reformulates a product — adds more sugar, swaps an ingredient — the score will shift. And if you ever think something looks off, you can flag it in the app. We actually read those.