Blocked

Does the organic claim on this page resolve against the certifier's own public register?

ALS-COFFEE-1.3-CERT-003

This question matters to a buyer and CANNOT be answered from a public product page today. What would be required is stated in full.

Why this cannot be run

Blocked by G-04, G-06.

Assertion

organic_claim_register_resolution resolves_against_register true

Applicability

applies when
the page states an organic claim and names a certifying agent
signal
an organic claim plus a named agent in product text

Accepted evidence

  • external_register — a record for the seller's legal operation with status Certified as of the sale date, whose certified-product scope covers handled or processed coffee
  • product_description — the certifying agent's name and the certified legal operation name published on the page, which are the two keys a lookup needs

Explicitly insufficient evidence

What does not count, and why. Published because the omission is where a check quietly becomes a claim.

  • a certificate PDF hosted on the seller's own domain
    Self-published is not the register, and the register exists precisely because a document can outlive the certification it describes.
  • a genuine, well-formatted certificate whose validity period has ended
    The most convincing-looking near-miss there is, and the exact case the register's surrendered, suspended and revoked statuses exist to catch.
  • a register hit on a similarly-named entity
    A brand or trading name matched against a different legal operation is fuzzy entity resolution rather than a lookup, and it invents its own evidence.
  • a hit whose certified-product scope excludes handling
    A crops-only record does not authorise a roaster's organic label, so scope match matters as much as status.
  • a farm's or exporter's certificate offered for the roaster
    Only a certified handler may use the seal, so the register must resolve to the entity on the label.
  • "not found in the register" rendered as a false claim
    A roaster can legitimately sell certified coffee without holding a certificate itself, and rendering absence as falsity would be the worst false statement this product could make about a store.

Conflict rules

  • When the register is unreachable — then produce an honest unreachable state rather than degrading to a failure; an unreachable register must never look like a failed lookup precedence: external_register > product_description
  • When the page publishes no certificate number — then treat the absence as a page finding rather than as a failed lookup, because no number is required on the label and fuzzy-matching a brand to a holder is not verification

Discrimination

Authored expectation: no prediction, confidence low. The numeric band this standard used to carry is not published at this grammar version.

Most pages that claim organic publish neither the certifying agent's name nor the certified legal entity, so the lookup would have no key and the assertion would fail for most of the population it applies to. The failure would usually be a page-disclosure finding rather than a certification finding, which is a distinction the assertion must preserve.

The numeric fail-rate band this reasoning was authored with is NOT carried at grammar 1.2 and is not reproduced here. Authored bands held 1 of 10 against this category's own sample and every miss was HIGH, so a direction derived from the band would inherit the error that condemned it (SCHEMA.md §9.3 step 3). The band survives in ALS-COFFEE v1.1 (standard_hash f8ec2780f60c38931913e5b6cd37506500c8462709209de7180ba6691d6137e7), which is byte-frozen and still served.

For a shopper

You can do this check yourself today, free, in the public register: search the roaster's legal name and read the status and the certified-product scope. What stops it being automatic is that pages publish brand names while the register holds legal operation names.

For a merchant

Publish the certifying agent's name and your certified legal operation name — and the certificate number if you have one — so that a reader can resolve the claim deterministically rather than by guesswork.

Grounding

  • CCOF, guidance on using the Organic INTEGRITY Database (certification_body)
    that a certifying agent authorised under the national organic programme describes the register as the official place to check whether an operation is certified, and positions checking it as ongoing supplier management and fraud prevention rather than as a shopper task
  • USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, organic enforcement settlements index (regulator)
    that the regulator maintains an ongoing published record of settlements for organic misrepresentation, which is the regulator's own evidence that absent or lapsed certification coexists with live organic labelling