NOVA group 3: processed foods
Group 1 with group 2 added, and still recognisably the original food.
Group 3 is a group 1 food with something from group 2 added, usually to preserve it or to make it palatable. Tinned vegetables in brine, fruit in syrup, cured meats, most cheeses, freshly baked bread, salted nuts.
The test is whether the original food is still the thing you are eating. Bacon is salted pork and is still pork. A tin of tomatoes is tomatoes.
This is the group people get wrong
Group 3 catches almost everything that feels processed but is not ultra-processed, and it is where the intuition that packaged means bad breaks down. A jar of passata, a block of cheddar and a tin of chickpeas are group 3 and will never be anything else.
Bread is the item that splits. A loaf of flour, water, salt and yeast is group 3. Most industrial sliced bread contains emulsifiers and improvers and is group 4. The receipt line rarely distinguishes them, which is the practical problem this whole site is about. Everything here sits under ultra-processed food, which explains the whole system and how to tell the groups apart in a shop.
Common questions
- Is cheese ultra-processed?
- Most cheese is group 3: milk, salt, cultures and rennet. Processed cheese slices and spreads containing emulsifying salts are group 4.
- Is tinned food ultra-processed?
- Not by virtue of being tinned. A tin is packaging. Tinned tomatoes and tinned pulses are 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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