Published methodology
How the Six Cut Score works
Every shop gets two numbers: its Google rating, straight from Google — and the Six Cut Score, ours. The Six Cut Score is a /10 built by reading what reviewers actually say, not just the stars they leave. It is fully deterministic: same reviews in, same score out. No black box, no pay-to-play, no editorializing.
The five components
Meat quality
40%What reviewers say about the product itself.
Review text is scanned for 24 positive quality signals (fresh, tender, marbling, dry-aged…) against 20 negative ones (tough, gristle, off smells…). The balance, smoothed so a single mention never dominates, becomes the component score.
Service
20%What reviewers say about the people behind the counter.
The same balance approach across 12 positive service signals (knowledgeable, helpful, welcoming…) and 16 negative ones (rude, ignored, overcharged…).
Butchercraft
15%Evidence of real butcher expertise, not just a meat counter.
We look for 17 craft markers — custom cuts, cut-to-order, dry-aging, house-made sausage and charcuterie, special orders, whole-animal work. Four or more distinct mentions earns full marks.
Rating foundation
15%The shop's overall Google rating, normalized.
A 5.0 shop earns full marks, a 3.0 shop earns zero — review language above tells us the rest of the story.
Review volume
10%Confidence: a 4.9 from 500 reviews beats a 5.0 from 2.
Log-scaled review count; roughly 500 reviews earns full marks, so big shops can't simply buy the top spot with volume alone.
The fine print
- Scores are recomputed monthly from the most recent reviews Google provides, so a shop that improves, improves.
- Google shares at most 5 recent reviews per shop at a time. When few reviews are available to analyze, the text components earn proportionally less weight and the difference shifts to the rating foundation — thin evidence is never treated as strong evidence.
- Each monthly refresh we bank the signal counts of every review we see — how many quality, service, and craft markers it contained — never the review text itself. Scoring combines this month's reviews with all banked signals from the past 30 days.
- We analyze review text live and store only the resulting numbers — never the reviews themselves.
- Shops with no reviews yet show “—” rather than a guess.
- Every shop's page shows its full component breakdown. If you think a score is wrong, the receipts are right there.
- No shop can pay to change its score. There is nothing to buy.
Scores get fairer every month
A brand-new score starts from a 5-review snapshot — the most Google shares in one go. But every monthly refresh banks the signals of the reviews it sees, so the pool each shop is judged on deepens over time: a busy shop ends up scored on its full month of reviews, not a handful. Expect scores to normalise as the archive grows— early swings from one hot or cold review fade, and each shop converges toward its true month-over-month form. Every shop's page shows how many reviews its score was built from.