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Is frozen pizza ultra-processed?

A plain margherita can be group 3. Most are not.

It depends on the pizza, and unusually the base is rarely the problem. A dough of flour, water, yeast, oil and salt is group 3, and so is passata and so is mozzarella.

A plain margherita made from those three things is group 3, and a few genuinely are. Freezing changes nothing, since it adds nothing.

The toppings are what move it

  • Processed cheese or a cheese blend with emulsifying salts, which is common on cheaper pizzas: group 4.
  • Pepperoni, ham and most cured toppings, which are usually reformed with stabilisers: group 4.
  • Dough conditioners and emulsifiers in the base, common in thin and crispy: group 4.
  • Flavourings in the sauce: group 4.

The same split runs through cheese and sausages generally: whether the dairy and the meat are the things themselves or reformed versions of them.

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 takeaway pizza ultra-processed?
Made to order from dough, tomato and mozzarella, it is group 3 on the same test. NOVA classifies the food rather than where it was made.

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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