Data & trust
A ranking is only as good as its numbers. Here's exactly where The Barometer's data comes from, how current it is, and how it stays honest.
Bars tracked
172
and counting
On the leaderboard
130
42 more in review
Hand-checked
100
reviewed against the label
Cross-verified
0
OFF + USDA agree
Auto-imported
30
complete OFF labels
With real photos
170/172
rest use placeholders
Last updated
2026-07-19
most recent change
Where the numbers come from
- Launch set (100 bars): the most popular bars, compiled by hand from product labels, official brand sites, and major nutrition databases, then spot-checked.
- Open Food Facts (72 bars): a scheduled job harvests the free, open Open Food Facts database daily — sweeping every protein-bar category and every brand we already track — then routes each new bar by data quality. Entries with a complete, plausible label (full nutrition panel and an ingredient list) are added to the board and flagged auto-imported; anything with gaps waits in the review queue until a human confirms it. That way a genuinely good bar is never missed just because it fell off a page — worst case, it sits near the top of the queue. Where possible, each import is also cross-checked by barcode against USDA FoodData Central — two independent sources agreeing marks a bar cross-verified; a disagreement holds it out of the rankings for human review.
- Community submissions (0 so far): anyone can submit a bar; entries are reviewed against the label before they join the board.
How we keep it honest
- One published formula. Every score comes from the same weighted formula on the methodology page — nothing hand-tuned per bar.
- Auditable sources. Each bar links out to the sources its data came from (spanning 73+ sites) so you can check the label yourself.
- Photos are open-licensed. Product images come from Open Food Facts; bars without one get a generated placeholder rather than a scraped image.
- No pay-to-rank.Buy links may become affiliate links, but they never affect a bar's score, and that will always be stated.
The honest caveats
This is a heuristic, not a lab assay. A few secondary fields on newer, direct-to-consumer bars are best-effort estimates where labels aren't published online — those bars are marked community-submitted / pending verification. Formulations and prices change constantly, so always confirm the label on the package you actually buy.