Are beer and wine ultra-processed?

Under NOVA, beer and wine are group 3. They are made by fermenting a group 1 food, grain or grapes, which is a process applied to a food rather than a formulation assembled from extracted substances.

This is the answer that most reliably makes people distrust the classification, so it is worth being exact about what it is claiming. It is claiming that beer is manufactured more like cheese than like a soft drink. It is not claiming that beer is comparable to cheese in any other respect, and NOVA has nothing at all to say about alcohol.

What is group 4

• Alcopops and pre-mixed cans: flavourings, sweeteners and colours.
• Flavoured ciders and fruit beers where the flavour is added rather than fermented.
• Pre-mixed cocktails in cans and bottles.
• Alcohol-free beers vary: some are simply de-alcoholised beer and stay group 3, others are formulated and are group 4.

Spirits are group 1 or 2 depending on how you read distillation, which is a removal rather than an addition. It is one of the genuinely contested edges of the classification and a good example of why the criticisms section on the pillar exists.

On a receipt, alcohol is also one of the categories most likely to be VAT-marked, which is about tax rather than about food. See how a receipt is structured.

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.