Are tortilla wraps ultra-processed?

Almost always group 4, and this one catches people out because a wrap feels like a flatter, plainer version of bread, where the answer genuinely splits.

Staying soft is the whole problem

A wrap has to fold without cracking after weeks in a packet. A traditional tortilla of flour, water, fat and salt goes stiff in a day. Bridging that gap needs humectants, usually glycerol, to hold moisture, plus emulsifiers, raising agents and preservatives. Any one of those is a group 4 marker and most packets carry several.

• Flour, water, fat, salt, and nothing else: group 3. Rare in a supermarket, common in a Mexican grocer.
• Glycerol, emulsifiers, acidity regulators, preservatives: group 4.
• Corn tortillas are more often group 3, being traditionally maize, water and lime.
• Wholemeal and seeded versions are no different on this test.

It is a clean example of the pattern that recurs across a supermarket: the property the product is sold on, in this case convenience and shelf life, is exactly the property that requires the additives. Nothing about it is careless manufacturing.

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.