Spend your organic budget where it matters most

How the allocation works

Every food on your list gets an Organic Upgrade Priority score from 0 to 100. It is the product of three things: how far the organic residue evidence index sits below the conventional one, how often you eat the food at your household's purchase volume, and how much the underlying sample sets justify a firm answer.

The optimizer then divides that score by the extra dollars per week the organic version costs you, sorts by the result, and fills your budget from the top. That ratio — priority points per dollar — is why a $1.00 upgrade on carrots can outrank a $4.40 upgrade on strawberries even though strawberries carry more residue evidence.

The four verdicts

• Prioritize organic — priority score of 38 or above. A large measured gap on a food you eat regularly.
• Consider organic — 24 to 38. Worth doing when the budget stretches.
• Conventional is a reasonable budget choice — below 24. The measured difference is small enough that the money does more somewhere else.
• Insufficient data — either residue monitoring does not apply to the food, or there is no usable organic sample set to compare against. We do not fill that gap with a guess.

What this is not

Priority is not a danger score, a toxicity score, or a safety ranking. The EPA states plainly that finding a residue does not mean a food is unsafe, and USDA testing consistently finds more than 99% of samples below federal benchmarks. What the score measures is where an organic dollar buys the largest measurable change — which is a budgeting question, not a health-risk one.

When a commodity has no organic samples at all, the site does not invent a comparison. Where a fallback is used anywhere in the pipeline it is the dataset-wide median reduction (22% of the conventional index), it is labelled on the page, and it never produces a "prioritize" verdict on its own.