Is soup ultra-processed?

This is one where the chilled aisle beats the tin, which is the opposite of the pattern in most categories.

• Fresh chilled soup of vegetables, stock, cream and seasoning: group 3, and plenty are exactly that.
• Tinned soup: usually group 4, from modified starch, flavourings and often flavour enhancers.
• Packet and instant soup: group 4 without exception worth relying on.
• Cup-a-soup style products are formulations rather than soup in any useful sense.

Why tins go the other way

A tin has to survive retorting, a high-temperature sterilisation, and then sit stable for a couple of years. Starches that hold texture through that, and flavourings that survive it, are what get added. A chilled soup with a fortnight of shelf life has a much easier job and needs less.

Stock cubes and liquid stocks are almost all group 4, which matters because they turn a homemade soup into one containing a group 4 ingredient. That does not make the soup group 4, since NOVA classifies the product you buy rather than what you cook.

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.