Ultra-processed food checker

An ultra-processed food checker matches a packaged ingredient list against substances that only enter food on a production line. Paste a US label below and this page names which entries are markers of industrial processing, which are ordinary food, and which it could not read at all. The published reference holds 74 markers across nine categories.

A marker is a claim about how the food was made, not about what it does to anyone who eats it. Everything runs in your browser: nothing is uploaded, no account is involved, and the whole reference list is printed at the bottom of this page so the result can be checked by eye.

What counts as a marker of industrial processing

A marker of industrial processing is a substance that does not appear in a domestic kitchen and only enters food on a production line: a synthetic colour, a high-intensity sweetener, an emulsifier, a modified starch. Naming one is a statement about manufacture, checkable against the label, and this page holds 70 of them.

Nobody keeps polysorbate 80, azodicarbonamide or maltodextrin in a cupboard. Their presence tells you something firm — that the product came off a line with the equipment and shelf-life requirements a line brings with it. That is a different kind of statement from a verdict on health, and it is the only kind this page makes.

A marker says the food was manufactured, not that the food is dangerous. The first can be read off the label by anyone; the second cannot be read off a label at all.

There is no fuzzy matching here, and that is deliberate. On additive names a near-miss search is confident and wrong — sorbitol and sorbitan differ by two letters and are different substances — and the cost of that error is telling someone something untrue about food they are about to eat. Failing to find a name is the cheaper mistake, which is why unread entries are reported rather than guessed at.

The dividing line is imperfect and worth stating plainly. Xanthan gum and steviol glycosides are sold in supermarkets to home bakers, so a purist could argue them out of the set, and four entries in the reference — annatto, carmine, ascorbic acid and tocopherols — are held there precisely so the checker recognises them without flagging them. How entries earn a place, and how often the regulatory notes are re-read against their source documents, is set out in how the food list is built.

Where the NOVA idea fits, and where it stops

NOVA is an academic classification that sorts food by degree of industrial processing, from group 1, which is unprocessed or minimally processed, to group 4, ultra-processed. Group 4 is defined largely by the presence of ingredients and processes rarely used in home cooking. No US or EU regulator classifies food this way.

The checker does not assign a NOVA group, because a group depends on the whole product and its proportions, and this page only sees the words on the label. What it does is report which of the nine marker categories are present. Those categories are where the NOVA idea and a printed ingredient list actually touch.

Why categories count for more than substances

Counting categories separates a product that uses one technology repeatedly from a product built out of several technologies at once. Five colours in a candy draw on a single industrial capability. A colour, an emulsifier and a flavouring draw on three, and the second pattern describes how the product was assembled far better than the number of hits does.

A fruit-flavoured drink listing Red 40, Blue 1 and Yellow 5 returns three matches and one category — one job, done three times, because a single shade rarely holds on its own. A cereal bar listing soy lecithin, natural flavors and high fructose corn syrup returns the same three matches across three categories, and that is a longer manufacturing route.

The checker prints each match with the job it does in the food rather than rolling everything into one score. A score would flatten exactly the distinction that carries the information, and it would also imply a precision that a list of names cannot support.

Two limits ride along with any count. The checker reads names, not amounts, so a marker printed at the end of a long list and one printed near its start weigh the same in the tally, even though the ordering of the label says they do not. And a short ingredient list is not automatically a simpler product — it can equally be a list with fewer components disclosed under their own names.

What the three answers mean

Every entry lands in one of three states, and the count of parsed entries is printed above them all. A checker that says only found or not found hides its own vocabulary gaps: if four names out of twenty-eight fail to parse and the tool still prints a clean result, that is a gap in the data presented as a finding.

US food labels also nest brackets, and that is where most parsers break. The rule this page applies is simple: a comma inside brackets marks a nested ingredient list, so Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron) expands into four entries, while brackets with no comma are a note on the name, so Cocoa (Processed with Alkali) stays as one. Without that rule the tally of parsed entries is meaningless, and the tally is the whole promise.

When a barcode scanner is the better tool

This checker reads text and nothing else. It has no barcode database, no nutrition panel, no portion arithmetic and no view of the product beyond the words pasted into it. For a weekly shop where the question is which of two packs to put in the trolley, a scanner answers faster.

Which scanners cover US shelves, what each one publishes about its own method, and where the records run thin are compared in the best food scanner apps round-up. If a barcode fails to resolve there, pasting the printed list here is the fallback, which is the honest description of how the two fit together.

The full list this page matches against

Below is every marker the checker can flag, grouped by the nine categories above. Entries that carry a regulatory fact print it under the role, together with the document it comes from, so it can be verified rather than taken on trust — Red 40, for example, requires an EU labelling statement under Regulation (EC) No 1333/2008, Annex V, and the wider picture around it sits on the Red 40 additive page.

What this page will not tell you

It will not tell you whether a named product from a named brand is good or bad. That would be a claim about a specific company’s goods, and this site does not make those. The checker reads only text you paste in yourself, the result is generated in your browser, and it is never stored or published anywhere.

There is also no regulator anywhere that certifies an ultra-processed food list. NOVA is a research classification, published additive lists disagree with one another about where the line falls, and this page publishes its own so the disagreement is visible instead of hidden. None of it is medical advice: questions about a specific diet belong with a registered dietitian or a doctor, who can weigh a whole day of eating rather than one ingredient list.