Best Ethical Food Brands in New Zealand

Ceres Organics Organic Lentils, Chickpeas & Garden Peas

How the Throne Standard is calculated for food and supplements

Pack: Food 1.0.0 · Standard 2.2 · Engine: Declaration · Status: Published

Food and supplements are scored on their full ingredient declaration, read against a versioned list of processing markers.

The calculation

Product value = 100 if every declared ingredient passes the list; 0 if any ingredient fails; otherwise unresolved

A product passes when its complete declaration contains none of the flagged markers: artificial colours and flavours, non-nutritive sweeteners, hydrogenated oils, added nitrites and nitrates, and flavour enhancers. Supplements also flag fillers and coatings such as magnesium stearate and titanium dioxide.

The full declaration for the exact product is read and each name is normalised (case, synonyms, Latin names, footnote marks, bracketed common names, "may contain" lists).

A name that is not on the list leaves the product unresolved. An unread or incomplete declaration is a gap, never a fail.

The share of individual ingredients that pass is shown beside each product as an unscored detail, so a near miss is visible.

Nutrition and health claims are never scored. This is a processing measure, not a nutrition score.

Bands (the same in every category)
Value	Band
100	5/5
90 to below 100	4/5
60 to below 90	3/5
40 to below 60	2/5
0 to below 40	1/5

All arithmetic is exact (fractions, never rounded floating point). Nothing is rounded before the band test, and each band includes its lower bound. Values are shown cut to two decimals, never rounded up, so 89.996 shows as 89.99 and is 3/5.

A worked example with a real declaration and today's result

Organic Oatcakes Traditional, Clearspring
Step	Result
Declared ingredients	Oatmeal (86%), olive oil, sea salt, raising agent: sodium bicarbonate
Normalised	oatmeal; olive oil; sea salt; sodium bicarbonate
List decisions	none of the four names is yet on the versioned list
Product value	unresolved: the permitted-name list is not complete
When the list is complete	100 if no name is a flagged marker, otherwise 0

From products to a brand result

Each parent product counts once. Sizes add no votes; variants with different complete declarations each count once and the parent takes their mean.

The published score is the share of scored products whose ingredient list is readable and has no flagged processing marker. It is not weighted by price or sales. One result per category; never one overall brand score.

Products with no scored composition or ingredient list stay outside the score. They lower coverage. They are not counted as zero.

100% of the scored products passing is 5/5. A catalogue that is only partly read still has a score, and the page states how many products were scored.

Unknown is never a fail. A missing, unread or conflicting record lowers coverage and is shown as a gap.

Evidence we use

The ingredient declaration for the exact product from the brand page or label. Every record keeps its source address, exact locator, capture date and a SHA-256 hash of what we read. Evidence older than two years is re-checked before it supports a high level.

What the listing shows

A listing shows one score out of 5 from the products that had a readable ingredient list. Milk, cocoa butter, plain sugar and sunflower lecithin are not fails. A bare flavour with no origin stays outside the score.

The reports