Every product gets two things: a transparency score and a certification tier. Here's exactly how we calculate both.
TIP checks every ingredient against official banned and restricted lists from five jurisdictions. Every flag includes a regulation number, a year, and an issuing regulatory body. No health claims. No peer-reviewed citations. No editorial judgment. If we can't source it to a Tier 1 government database, it doesn't appear in TIP.
All regulatory data sourced from Tier 1 official sources only — EUR-Lex, European Commission food additives database, UK FSA (data.food.gov.uk), Health Canada, FSANZ, and Japan MHLW. Wikipedia and user-editable sources are permanently excluded.
The transparency score measures how much of a product's ingredient list TIP can actually evaluate. Some ingredients are named clearly — water, salt, enriched flour. Others hide behind vague legal catch-all terms.
Named ingredients TIP can check directly against regulatory lists.
Ingredients TIP can partially assess based on available information.
Vague terms like 'natural flavors' or 'spices' that TIP cannot assess.
If less than 70% of a product's ingredient list is evaluable, it is automatically Risky — not because we found something wrong, but because we don't know enough to score it. TIP will not certify a product it cannot see.
Banned: absent from a jurisdiction's positive list entirely, or explicitly prohibited. Restricted: authorized but with category limits, usage caps, or mandatory warning labels that diverge meaningfully from US use.
I started building TIP thinking it would be simple. Read the label, check the ingredients, return a result. Then I hit a wall.
US labeling law allows manufacturers to list hundreds of individual compounds under a single term — "natural flavors." The same is true of "spices," "flavoring," and similar catch-alls. This isn't illegal. It's by design, to protect proprietary formulas. But it means a scanner reading the label literally cannot know what's inside those terms. I had built a tool that could read what manufacturers chose to show — but not what they chose to hide.
So I had to rethink. I needed a way to verify what was actually in these products — without scaring off manufacturers by demanding they hand over their secret formulas.
The answer is independent lab testing, commissioned by TIP — not by the manufacturer. For TIP Verified brands, we test the product directly. The natural flavor compounds get verified without the formula ever being disclosed. The manufacturer keeps their recipe. The consumer gets verified transparency. For everything else, TIP is honest about what it can and cannot see — and the transparency score reflects that gap exactly.
When you scan a product that isn't TIP Verified, we show you exactly how much of the label we can and cannot read. We encourage every manufacturer to get certified and be as transparent as possible. Until they do, we give you the most honest picture we can.
Every regulatory classification in TIP requires a specific regulation or directive number, a year, and the issuing regulatory body — sourced directly from official government databases. Secondary sources, consumer health websites, and Wikipedia are permanently excluded. If we cannot independently verify a classification from a Tier 1 source, the ingredient is listed as unverified and does not appear in TIP.
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