Is smoked salmon ultra-processed?
Salt and real smoke is group 3. Smoke flavouring is not.
Traditionally smoked salmon is group 3: salmon, salt, and smoke from burning wood. Two of those are foods and the third is a preservation method rather than an ingredient.
The one word that changes it
Smoke flavouring. Some products are not smoked at all but treated with a manufactured smoke preparation, which is faster and more consistent. That is a flavouring, and a flavouring is a group 4 marker.
The label distinguishes them: smoked describes a process, and smoke flavouring describes an ingredient. Added sugar in the cure is common and does not move it, being a group 2 ingredient.
The same distinction runs through bacon and a good deal of the chilled meat aisle: whether the flavour came from a process or from a bottle.
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 the sugar in the cure matter?
- No. Sugar is a group 2 culinary ingredient, so a cure of salt and sugar leaves the product in group 3.
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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