What are the four NOVA groups?
NOVA has four groups: whole or barely changed foods, kitchen ingredients like salt, sugar and oil, processed foods that combine the two, and ultra-processed foods with at least one ingredient a kitchen doesn’t keep. It sorts food by how it was made and leaves nutrition out on purpose.
People tend to hear “four groups” and think of a ladder from healthy to unhealthy, like a grade. That’s the wrong picture. The groups are bins for how food is made, and some of the placements surprise everyone, NOVA’s own experts included.
We’d use the groups the way you’d use a map of a supermarket, to know where you are and find the version of a food one aisle over. Put the nutrition beside it on its own line, since a group 4 loaf can carry three times the fiber of a group 3 one.
The four groups
| Group | Our name | What it is | NOVA’s own examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Whole or barely changed | The food itself, cleaned, dried, ground, frozen, pasteurized or fermented | Frozen vegetables, beans, eggs, milk, rolled oats and flour, pasta and couscous made with flour and water, plain yogurt with no sugar or sweetener |
| 2 | Kitchen ingredient | Things pressed or refined from food to cook it with | Salt, sugar, honey, maple syrup, vegetable oils, butter, corn starch |
| 3 | Processed | Group 1 food with group 2 ingredients added | Canned vegetables and beans, salted nuts, canned fish, cheeses, freshly made bread |
| 4 | Ultra-processed | Formulations with an ingredient kitchens rarely use, or a cosmetic additive | Soft drinks, packaged snacks, mass-produced packaged bread, breakfast cereals, “fruit” yogurts, nuggets, instant noodles |
The surprises
- Dried pasta is group 1, the same as plain oats, because it’s flour and water.
- Freezing doesn’t count. Frozen peas are group 1.
- Cheese is group 3, milk with salt, the same as canned beans.
- A plain yogurt with a sweetener added is group 4, NOVA’s authors say, and so is bread with an emulsifier.
- Even plain corn flakes are group 1 in the 2019 paper. Add sugar and they’re processed. Add a flavor or a color and they’re ultra-processed.
Test yourself in spot the ultra-processed, ten rounds of two foods each.
How sure the groups are
Less than the neat table suggests. In 2022, French researchers asked about 160 food and nutrition specialists to sort 120 labeled products into NOVA groups. Their agreement score (Fleiss’ kappa) was 0.32 on a scale where 1 means everyone agreed. Products like soda landed in group 4 almost every time, while others split across groups. The authors concluded that NOVA’s criteria don’t let people sort foods consistently, even with the ingredient list in hand.
The checker places only the foods in its own list, each with the ingredient that decided it, and it never scores a diet on the groups. More in processing isn’t the same thing as nutrition.
What we’d do
- Learn the one test for group 4 in how to tell.
- See every group on one shelf in the four groups guide.
3 sources
- Monteiro et al., NOVA. The star shines bright, World Nutrition, 2016worldnutritionjournal.org
- Monteiro et al., Ultra-processed foods: what they are and how to identify them, Public Health Nutrition, 2019pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Braesco et al., Ultra-processed foods: how functional is the NOVA system?, European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2022pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
