The five star system is our way of telling consumers how contaminated their pet’s food is compared to the rest of the products we tested. The stars are not arbitrary, but the result of a carefully developed system. We developed this system in conjunction with data scientists, epidemiologists, veterinarians, chemists and using survey data from over a thousand consumers just like you to synthesize the thousands of data-points collected on each product to make it easier to interpret and use the data in a meaningful way. Our system is designed to save time — distilling thousands of pieces of information into a single rating. A 5-star rating means the product is amongst the best when looking at environmental and industrial contaminants. A 1-star rating means that the product is among the worst- meaning it has among the highest amount of industrial and environmental contaminants. A 3-star is about average. That said, we get a lot of requests from concerned consumers wanting increased transparency on the Clean Label Project website. We have a new website under development that will provide more detail about the industrial and environmental contaminants and toxins. Stay tuned!