EDITORIAL POLICY
What money can't buy here.
ZERO will eventually make money from the brands it lists. That is exactly why these rules are written down now, while nothing is at stake, instead of being decided in the middle of a negotiation.
Money never moves a rank
Rankings are generated from the catalogue by one published formula. A brand can buy a clearly labelled slot beside a list. It cannot buy a position inside the list, and no payment has ever changed one. If that rule breaks, everything else on this site becomes worthless — it is the whole asset.
Sponsored is always labelled
Anything paid for carries the word Sponsored, in the same size as the surrounding text, before you read the claim — not in a footnote underneath it.
We don't take payment to remove a product
A brand cannot pay to have a competitor delisted, downranked, or its numbers softened. Products leave the shelf when they're discontinued or when our data turns out to be wrong.
The score is published, not negotiated
The formula lives on the methodology page and runs identically on every product. Nobody gets a hand-adjusted number, and a low score is never a sales conversation.
Numbers are sourced or absent
Every figure is label-checked, or attributed to a citable published source and marked estimated, or shown as “—”. We do not fill gaps with plausible guesses, and we say so when sources disagree.
Sweeteners are reported, never ranked
We publish what sweetens a product and what it contributes. We don't rank sweeteners against each other — that would be a health claim, and ZERO doesn't make health claims.
If we ever break one of these
Tell us, publicly. A discovery site that quietly sells its rankings is worth nothing to the person reading it, and the only real check on that is being caught.
How the numbers are graded: the ZERO Score. Where they come from: our data policy.