Rootify reports public records about food companies and the things they sell. Every line on a product page is something a government register, a recall notice, a regulator or a package label says, shown with the date we read it. This page collects the limits of that, so the rest of the site can show you the records instead of arguing about them.
There is no trust score, no letter grade, no traffic light and no number summarising a product or a company. This is deliberate and it is not going to change. A score is a verdict, a verdict is an opinion, and an opinion about a named company is the one thing we are not in a position to defend. Facts with dates and sources are.
Where the site shows an order, the order says what is most worth reading about first — recalls before open research, open research before records we have not been able to check. It is not a judgement about which product is better. Where the site shows a percentage of shared ingredients between two products, that is a measure of how much two labels coincide, nothing more. A shorter ingredient list is not automatically a better one.
Every check on this site reports one of three things, and they are not interchangeable:
The second and third are the ones that matter here. “Not in the organic register” is a fact about a register. “Not organic” is a claim about how food was grown, and we do not make it. The same applies everywhere: no recall on file does not mean a product is safe, no study on file does not mean an ingredient has been cleared, and an empty section means we hold nothing — not that there is nothing.
Some ingredients are marked as worth looking into. That mark is set by a classification rule — the ingredient is an additive or a processing ingredient rather than a whole food — and not by anybody reading a study. It is not a finding that an ingredient is harmful, and most flagged ingredients have no research on file at all. Where we do hold research, the ingredient page shows it and cites it.
An authority classification and a scientific study are also different grades of evidence, and we never merge them. How we source sets out which is which.
The allergen filter is derived from the ingredient list we hold. It is not the label’s own “Contains” statement, which is the authoritative one and which we do not yet store. It cannot see “may contain traces of” warnings, and it cannot see inside a blend such as “natural flavor”.
If you are avoiding an allergen because it can hurt you, read the package. Do not rely on this filter, or on any filter.
Nothing here is medical, nutritional or dietary advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy or avoid anything. We are not a laboratory: we have tested no product and analysed no sample. Everything on the site is a record somebody else published, quoted and dated.
Recipes and formulations change, and a record we read last month may describe a package that has since been reformulated. The date beside every line is there so you can judge how current it is.
Product and ingredient data comes largely from Open Food Facts, a public database built by contributors who transcribe labels. Certification data comes from the USDA Organic Integrity Database, which registers certified operations— companies — and not individual products. Recall notices come from the agencies that issued them. The attribution for each is in the footer and on each product’s sources page.
Some of it is wrong. Transcriptions contain errors, the same product sometimes appears twice, and company records are matched to brands by name, which occasionally matches the wrong company. When we find an error we correct it and keep the correction visible.
If something on this site is wrong about you or your company, tell us and we will fix it. Send the page and what is wrong to our contact page. A correction to a factual record does not require a lawyer and will not get one.
Rootify names real companies and quotes real regulatory records about them. Those records are public and we link them. We do not characterise a company’s motives, describe anyone as dishonest or negligent, or draw conclusions about a business from the records we hold about it. Where a record is disputed, we will say that it is disputed and link what the company said.
Company and brand names appear here to identify the products and records they belong to. No company named on Rootify endorses it or is affiliated with it, and brands cannot pay to appear, to be removed, or to be presented differently.