Methodology

How Harmony scores food

Every product and meal in Harmony gets a score from 1 to 100 using Food Compass 2.0, a nutrient-profiling system developed at Tufts University's Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy and published in Nature Food in 2024. The higher the score, the healthier the food.

Food Compass looks at the whole food rather than one nutrient at a time. Tufts states that the algorithm can be freely reproduced by anyone; Harmony implements it as published and applies it to the products you scan and the meals it plans.

What the score means

Harmony uses Tufts' own three bands and labels:

What goes into the score

Food Compass 2.0 rates 54 attributes of a food, grouped into 9 domains. Everything is measured per 100 calories, so a snack-size portion and a family-size portion of the same food score the same.

The domain totals are added together (specific lipids and phytochemicals at half weight) and placed on the 1–100 scale exactly as the paper describes.

How a scanned product is scored

1. Read the label. Harmony takes the nutrition facts and ingredient list from Open Food Facts, plus extra vitamin and mineral values from USDA FoodData Central when available.
2. Find the closest USDA food. The product is matched to the most similar of the 6,150 foods in the USDA Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies that Tufts published scores for, by product type first and then by name. Drinks are only ever matched to drinks.
3. Fill the gaps. Every value printed on the label is used as-is. Values labels don't carry, such as flavonoids or most vitamins, are estimated from the matched USDA food, scaled to the product's calories.
4. Score it. The processing level comes from Open Food Facts when known, otherwise from the matched USDA food, and additives are read from the ingredient list.

The app shows which USDA food was used and which values were estimated, so you can see exactly how each score was reached. If a product has no calories listed and no trustworthy match, Harmony shows no score rather than a guess.

How a meal is scored

Each ingredient is measured at a standard serving, using the FDA's Reference Amounts Customarily Consumed (21 CFR 101.12): for example 85 g of fish or chicken, 140 g of cooked rice or fruit, 85 g of vegetables and 1 tablespoon of oil. The ingredients are added together and the whole meal is scored as one food.

Meal plans only use meals that score 65 or higher, and processed meats such as bacon and sausage are never offered.

What isn't scored

• Alcoholic drinks. Food Compass does not rate them.
• Infant formula and baby food. Food Compass does not rate them.
• Products with almost no calories (under 5 calories per 100 g), such as water, plain tea and diet sodas. Because the score is per 100 calories, it isn't meaningful for them.

These products show "not scored" with the reason, and a product that can't be scored is never recommended as an alternative.

Flags shown next to the score

Some things families care about aren't part of Food Compass. Harmony shows them as separate flags so the score itself stays the published method:

• Organic or Non-GMO, and labeled as containing GMOs.
• Often high in pesticide residue unless organic, for crops such as strawberries, spinach, kale, apples, grapes, peaches, potatoes, rice and oats.
• Seed oils, naming which ones (canola, soybean, corn, sunflower, safflower, cottonseed and others).
• Contains a benzoate preservative, or benzoate with vitamin C, a combination that can form benzene.

Your family's health conditions, allergies and sensitivities are checked separately too, and any conflict is named on the product.

How closely our scores match Tufts'

Tufts published Food Compass 2.0 scores for thousands of USDA foods. We checked Harmony's scorer against 6,148 of them, using the same USDA data Tufts used:

Where the paper leaves a detail open to more than one reading, Harmony uses the reading that best reproduces Tufts' published scores. The check is re-run automatically every time the app's code changes.

Scores for packaged products depend on what the label and ingredient list show, so they can differ from a lab analysis, and manufacturers change recipes. Always read the label yourself, especially for allergies.

Source

Barrett EM, Shi P, Blumberg JB, O'Hearn M, Micha R, Mozaffarian D. Food Compass 2.0 is an improved nutrient profiling system to characterize healthfulness of foods and beverages. Nature Food 5, 911–915 (2024). doi:10.1038/s43016-024-01053-3

Harmony Food Agent is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Tufts University or the USDA.

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