News 26.06.2025

What does Ultra-Processed Food actually mean?

  • Additives
  • Misleading product labelling
  • Sugar, fat & salt
  • Traffic light labels
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Ultra-Processed Foods (UPFs) are everywhere — convenient, cheap, and long-lasting. But mounting research links them to serious health risks, including obesity, heart disease, and metabolic disorders.

But what exactly are UPFs? Think packaged snacks, sugary cereals, prepared meals, or soft drinks. As these foods dominate supermarket shelves and advertising campaigns, understanding their impact on health, nutrition, and food culture has never been more critical. Why does the food industry thrive on these foods and why is it important for consumers to recognize them? Read through to know more. 

To recognize Ultra-Processed Foods you should look out for attractively packaged, ready-to-use food preparations that are convenient and quick to consume such as instant noodles, flavoured milk drinks, industrial breads or chocolate bars. They are often heavily marketed by food producers: don’t let yourself be appealed by their health claims or the appetizing commercial on a billboard! 

Their recipes include food additives and highly processed technological ingredients such as maltodextrin, hydrogenated oils, modified starch or palm oil: all of them reserved for industrial use and that you wouldn’t use in your home cooking. Food additives such as emulsifiers, taste enhancers or antioxidants are also needed to modify the texture, taste or shelf life of UPFs. Their list of ingredients usually counts at least 5 ingredients. 

They have little to do with the raw foods from which they come from, that have undergone intense physical, chemical or biological transformation by industrial processes (for instance, fractioning into multiple components called “cracking” to produce starch, extrusion to make your favourite breakfast cereals or heating to very high temperatures for these onion-tasting savoury snacks you enjoy). 

What is the difference between processed and ultra-processed foods?  

The difference lies in the degree of transformation and the type of ingredients used. 

  • Processed foods have been altered from their raw state to ensure preservation, convenience or flavour enhancement. They are made by adding salt, oil, sugar or other culinary ingredients to raw foods. They remain recognisable as modified versions of unprocessed foods. The processing methods used are ancient and can still be used at-home, such as salting, pasteurization, fermentation, canning or freezing. 
    • For instance, canned vegetables or fish, cheese, fresh bread, most home-made dishes, fruit compote or plain yogurt are processed foods. 
  • Ultra-processed foods on the other hand go through multiple industrial processes and contain technological ingredients and food additives. They bear little resemblance to the original raw ingredients they are derived from. 
    • For instance, soft drinks, cookies, candies, most of ready-made meals, fast food items or industrial pastries are usually ultra-processed. 

Ultra-Processed Foods represent a frighteningly high part of people’s diet 

A study from the French NutriNet-Santé cohort showed that in 2018, UPFs contributed to 18,4% of the foods consumed in weight and as much as 35,9% of total energy intake4  ! In the EU, UPFs contribute between 15% (Romania) to 40% (Sweden) to total calories consumed5. 

In the US, the situation is even more alarming since almost 60% of the calories ingested come from UPFs6. Recent findings show this intake has continuously increased in the majority of the population over the past two decades. 

The NOVA classification: a key tool to study consumption and health impact of UPFs in our diets 

The NOVA classification system, developed by Brazilian researchers7 in the early 2000s, emerged as a groundbreaking framework to assess food based on its level of processing rather than just its nutritional content. This shift was crucial in understanding the rise of UPFs in diets and to be able to study their impact on health by classifying foods according to their degree of processing. Once something has been classified, it can be studied: by distinguishing between minimally processed foods and highly engineered formulations, the NOVA classification has become an essential tool in examining how food processing impacts public health and guiding policies to promote healthier diets, for instance by WHO and FAO. 

NOVA classifies foodstuffs into 4 groups: 

It includes fruits, nuts, vegetables, pulses, rice, pasta, eggs, meat, fish or milk. Minimally processed foods are natural foods altered by methods such as removal of inedible or unwanted parts, and processes that include drying, crushing, grinding, powdering, fractioning, filtering, roasting, boiling, non-alcoholic fermentation, pasteurization, chilling, freezing, placing in containers, and vacuum packaging. 

These include butter and salt, sugar and lard, oil and flour, meant to be used in small quantities with group 1 foods to make them more palatable. 

This category consists of foods that have been preserved, pickled, fermented or salted. Examples would be canned or bottled vegetables or pulses with added salt, whole fruits in syrup, pickles, traditionally made bread, smoked fish and cured meats. They are made by adding salt, oil, sugar or other substances from group 2 to group 1 foods. Processed foods usually retain the basic identity and most constituents of the original food. But when excessive oil, sugar or salt are added, they can become nutritionally unbalanced. 

As seen above, UPFs are formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, typically created by series of industrial techniques and processes. They tend to consist largely of the sugars, oils and starches from group 2, combined with colours, emulsifiers, flavourings and other additives to make them more palatable. They contain ingredients unfamiliar to domestic kitchens such as soy protein isolate, gluten, casein, high-fructose syrup, dextrose or soluble fibres. 

The NOVA classification has been subject to methodological criticisms. In a recent position paper, Food Drink Europe rejects the link between the degree of processing and the impact on health and argues that UPFs classifications are illogical and contradict the scientific evaluation of foods. Some scientists as well as public agencies, such as the French Food safety agency Anses or Belgian SPF, have also raised some methodological concerns in their expertise, pointing out for instance that NOVA's classification criteria are sometimes not sufficiently caracterised leading to subjective classification. 

The NOVA classification enabled the concept of ultra-processing to emerge and has been widely used by national and international public authorities over the past years, including WHO and FAO, as well as independent research in the study of diets and their impact on health, as no other tool had allowed it before. In February 2025, a group of expert scientists wrote a support letter emphasizing the relevance and usefulness of the NOVA classification. 

Food processing and nutritional profile: Two complementary approaches 

Is it not enough to have information on the nutritional value of foods? In other words, do we need information on the level of processing? It is true that UPFs do have a generally poorer nutritional quality. In an analysis of 79, 512 ultra-processed foods (classified as NOVA 4) from the Open Food Facts France (2021) database of French food products, researchers from the French EREN team (Nutritional Epidemiology Research Team) found that 87,5% of ultra-processed foods are classified as C, D and E, while 12,5% are in A or  B, using the latest version of the Nutri-Score algorithm.  The same research team managed to analyse the overall association between the degree of processing and the nutritional quality of foods. Between people with a nutritionally more favourable diet and people with a less nutritionally favourable diet, they showed 32% of the difference is due to differences in nutritional quality between food groups, while 22% is due to the choice of ultra-processed foods in a given food group. 

What about other countries? In Spain, a study similarly found ultra-processed foods in all Nutri-Score categories, ranging from 26,08% in nutritional category A, 51,48% in category B, 59,09% in category C, 67,39% in category D to up to 83,69% in nutritional category E. 

The degree of processing and nutritional quality are two complementary health dimensions of foods: a home-made cake isn’t considered as ultra-processed, despite its low nutritional quality and the need to eat it with moderation. The WHO is currently in the process of working towards a proposal for an operational consensus definition of UPFs. Hopefully this can lead to a better integration of these two important notions of nutritional values and degree of food processing and can help moving forward. For its part, foodwatch would be in favour of helping consumers identify UPFs on the shelves in a simple way, building upon the nutritional labelling already covered by Nutri-Score. Considering the current proliferation of logos and labels, the suggestion of an enhanced Nutri-Score bearing a black banner/box/frame to reflect ultra-processing – once an operational definition has been fully developed - could be a practical way forward. 

UPFs are now being singled out by several public health authorities that recommend reducing their consumption. WHO and FAO highlight the relationship between high intakes of UPFs and poor health outcomes. The German Nutrition Society provides dietary guidelines emphasizing the consumption of whole, minimally processed foods (vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, and nuts), advocating for a diet which inherently suggests limiting highly processed products. Similarly, Dutch guidelines encourage the consumption of unprocessed or minimally processed foods. These recommendations are encapsulated in the "Wheel of Five," the visual representation of the Dutch dietary guidelines. 

Sources and further information