Is jarred pasta sauce ultra-processed?
Passata is group 1 or 3. Most finished jars are group 4.
It depends how finished the jar is, and this category has one of the widest spreads in a supermarket.
- Tinned chopped tomatoes or plain passata: group 1, since nothing has been added.
- Passata with salt, or a sauce of tomatoes, oil, onion, garlic and herbs: group 3.
- Most branded jars: group 4.
What actually moves the jars
Not sugar, usually. Added sugar is a group 2 ingredient and does not move a product on its own. What moves most jarred sauces is modified starch used as a thickener, flavourings, and acidity regulators beyond plain citric acid.
Creamy and cheese-based sauces move more reliably again, because keeping dairy stable in a jar at room temperature generally needs stabilisers and emulsifiers.
The cheap substitution
A tin of tomatoes is one of the least processed and least expensive things in a shop, which is worth knowing simply as a fact about the shelf rather than as advice. This site does not tell anybody what to buy.
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
- Does added sugar make a sauce ultra-processed?
- No. Sugar is a group 2 culinary ingredient. A sauce of tomatoes, oil, herbs and sugar is group 3. It is the thickeners and flavourings that move a jar to group 4.
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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