Are baked beans ultra-processed?

Most standard tins are group 4, and the reason is easy to miss. Beans, tomatoes, sugar, salt and vinegar would be group 3, but the sauce in most leading tins is thickened with MODIFIED cornflour, and a modified starch is a group 4 marker.

Plain cornflour would not move it, being a culinary ingredient. Modified cornflour has been treated so it thickens and holds through retorting, which is a thing done to a starch to make a product work rather than an ingredient anybody cooks with. Read the list: if it says modified, the tin is group 4.

Tins that avoid it exist, generally organic or shorter-list own-brand ones, and those are group 3. The point is that it is decided by the sauce rather than by the beans, and that the answer for the tin most people actually buy is group 4.

Where it changes

Reduced-sugar and no-added-sugar versions are group 4 for a second, independent reason: taking the sugar out means putting a sweetener in, and non-sugar sweeteners are a group 4 marker on their own.

• Beans, tomatoes, sugar, salt, spirit vinegar, plain cornflour, spices: group 3.
• The same list with MODIFIED cornflour: group 4, and this is most tins.
• Sucralose, aspartame, acesulfame K, or 'sweetener': group 4.
• Flavoured tins, barbecue or smoky, usually carry flavourings and go to group 4.
• Beans with sausages depend on the sausages, which are almost always group 4.

The general pattern

Baked beans are a clean example of something that turns up repeatedly across a shop: the version marketed as the better choice is more often the ultra-processed one, because the thing being removed was doing a job and something had to replace it. The same holds for reduced-fat dairy and low-sugar drinks.

Working this out from a receipt is harder than from a packet, because a till prints about twenty characters of product name and no ingredients list. That is the problem Bagged exists to solve, and how a receipt is structured explains why it is the hard part.