What does the asterisk on a Tesco or Sainsbury's receipt mean?

It almost always marks a line that carries standard-rate VAT. Most food is zero-rated in the UK, so the asterisks tend to fall on non-food items, confectionery, crisps and soft drinks. Check the key printed at the foot of your own receipt, because codes vary by retailer.

Why do the item prices on my receipt not add up to the total?

Usually because promotions and loyalty prices are applied as separate saving lines rather than being deducted from each item, and because weighed items are rounded. The total printed at the bottom is the amount actually charged.

Can an app read a crumpled or faded receipt?

Often, but not always. Thermal paper fades, and a heavily creased or partially printed receipt can lose whole lines. Where a receipt only partly parses, Bagged shows the result marked as incomplete rather than presenting a figure as though the whole shop were counted.

Do I need to keep the paper receipt?

No. Once the photograph is read, the line items are what the app works from. What happens to the photograph itself is set out on the [privacy page](/privacy).

12 August 20263 min read

How to read a supermarket receipt

Truncated names, asterisks, savings lines and weight entries. A receipt is more legible than it looks once you know what each part is for.

A till receipt is the most detailed record of your household spending that anybody produces, and it is written in a private language designed to fit a roll of paper eight centimetres wide. Once the conventions are clear it stops being cryptic.

The worked example below is a real Tesco Superstore receipt from 12 August 2026, 16 lines, £36.19 in total.

The product name is truncated, not encoded

Most retailers allow around twenty characters for a product description, so names are compressed rather than abbreviated to a standard. A line reading TESCO SEMI SKIM 2.27L is own-brand semi-skimmed milk in a four-pint bottle. MCVITIE DIGESTIVE 400G is a packet of digestive biscuits.

There is no published dictionary for this. The compression is done per product by whoever set up the record, which is why two retailers will shorten the same item differently, and why reading a receipt at scale is a problem of world knowledge rather than of text parsing.

The asterisk is about tax, not about health

Many UK receipts mark certain lines with an asterisk or a letter code, and a key at the foot of the receipt explains it. This almost always indicates VAT liability. Most food and drink in the UK is zero-rated, so the marked lines are the standard-rated exceptions.

Those exceptions include confectionery, savoury snacks such as crisps, soft drinks, ice cream, and everything that is not food at all. It is tempting to read the asterisks as a shortcut to the ultra-processed lines, and it is genuinely correlated, but it is not the same thing and it will mislead you.

Plain biscuits are zero-rated. Chocolate-covered biscuits are standard-rated. Both can be ultra-processed.
Sliced industrial bread is zero-rated and is frequently ultra-processed.
Washing-up liquid is standard-rated and is not food at all.

The VAT code answers a question about tax law from the 1970s. It is a useful curiosity, not a classification.

Multibuys and loyalty prices appear after the fact

A promotion is usually not applied to the line itself. The items ring up at full price and a separate saving line appears further down, often grouped at the end under a heading such as savings or offers. Loyalty pricing behaves the same way.

This is the single most common reason a naive reading of a receipt produces the wrong answer. Adding up the item lines gives a number higher than the amount actually paid, and attributing the saving back to the right products takes some care. Bagged records the line total actually charged, after any multibuy, so the arithmetic reconciles.

Loose items are priced by weight

Fruit, vegetables, meat and fish sold loose print as two lines: a quantity and a unit price, then the resulting charge. A line such as 0.532 kg at £1.99 per kg followed by £1.06 is one product, not two. Anything reading a receipt has to collapse those pairs or it will double count.

Non-food is on the same paper and should not be in the same figure

Bin liners, washing-up liquid, batteries, a magazine and a bunch of flowers all sit in the same list as the food. Any statement about what share of your shop was ultra-processed has to decide what the denominator is.

Bagged excludes non-food entirely from the headline and reports it separately. On the example receipt that is £3.90 set aside, leaving £32.29 of food and drink as the denominator.

Folding the bin liners into the total would make the same shop look better, which is precisely why it is not done.

Why the printed total is the only number to trust

Between rounding on weighed items, promotions applied at basket level and any age-restricted or refunded lines, the sum of the visible item prices frequently differs from the total charged. The total at the foot of the receipt is the authoritative figure, and a parser that disagrees with it has made a mistake worth surfacing rather than hiding.

Common questions

What does the asterisk on a Tesco or Sainsbury's receipt mean?: It almost always marks a line that carries standard-rate VAT. Most food is zero-rated in the UK, so the asterisks tend to fall on non-food items, confectionery, crisps and soft drinks. Check the key printed at the foot of your own receipt, because codes vary by retailer.
Why do the item prices on my receipt not add up to the total?: Usually because promotions and loyalty prices are applied as separate saving lines rather than being deducted from each item, and because weighed items are rounded. The total printed at the bottom is the amount actually charged.
Can an app read a crumpled or faded receipt?: Often, but not always. Thermal paper fades, and a heavily creased or partially printed receipt can lose whole lines. Where a receipt only partly parses, Bagged shows the result marked as incomplete rather than presenting a figure as though the whole shop were counted.
Do I need to keep the paper receipt?: No. Once the photograph is read, the line items are what the app works from. What happens to the photograph itself is set out on the privacy page.