Is chocolate ultra-processed?
Plain dark can be group 3. Most bars are not.
Not always, which is the answer people least expect from this category. A dark chocolate bar of cocoa mass, cocoa butter and sugar is group 3: three ingredients, all of which are foods or culinary ingredients.
What moves it
Most bars on a supermarket shelf are group 4. Emulsifiers, usually soya lecithin or E476, appear in almost all milk chocolate. So do flavourings, and frequently vegetable fats replacing part of the cocoa butter.
- Cocoa mass, cocoa butter, sugar, and optionally vanilla: group 3.
- Soya lecithin, E476, flavouring, vegetable fat: group 4.
- Filled, coated and biscuit bars are group 4 without exception worth relying on.
- Cocoa powder for baking is group 2 or 3 depending on whether anything is added.
Lecithin is worth understanding rather than fearing, and there is a plain explanation of what it does in the glossary.
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.
Common questions
- Is dark chocolate ultra-processed?
- Plain dark chocolate with three or four ingredients is group 3. Many dark bars still contain an emulsifier, which would make them group 4, so the packet decides it.
One photo of a receipt answers this for your own shopping.
Bagged reads every line and reports what share of your food spend was ultra-processed, and which items it was.
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