The four groups, and the foods that surprise people

NOVA puts every food in one of four groups: whole or barely changed, kitchen ingredients, processed, and ultra-processed. The surprises are where people learn the rule. Whey protein, fruit yogurt and packaged sliced bread are group 4, and dried pasta, frozen peas and plain yogurt are group 1.

Why the groups trip people up

People sort food by feel. Anything that tastes sweet, comes in a crinkly bag or has a cartoon on the box goes in the bad pile, and anything with “protein”, “whole grain” or a picture of a farm goes in the good one.

NOVA ignores all of that. It looks at what was done to the food and what was added, so a tub of whey protein and a can of soda end up in the same group, and a bag of frozen peas ends up with fresh ones. Once you see why, you can sort almost anything in your kitchen yourself.

Group 1: whole or barely changed

The food itself, with only what NOVA’s authors list as minimal processes done to it: removing the parts you don’t eat, drying, crushing, grinding, roasting, boiling, pasteurizing, chilling, freezing, putting it in a container or vacuum pack, and fermenting without alcohol.

That covers fresh and frozen vegetables and fruit, plain oats and rice, beans and lentils from the bag, nuts, eggs, milk, fresh meat and fish, and coffee and tea. Two foods surprise people here. The 2018 NOVA paper names pasta made only of flour and water as group 1, and plain yogurt with no added sugar or sweetener too.

Group 2: kitchen ingredients

Things you cook group 1 food with, taken from foods or from nature: salt, sugar, honey, butter, lard, and oils like olive, canola and corn oil. Nobody eats a bowl of them on their own.

This group surprises people more than any other. Table sugar and every cooking oil sit here, beside olive oil and butter. NOVA’s authors say plant oils, sugar and salt, as used in cooking, aren’t ultra-processed, which describes how they’re made and used. How much of them to eat is a separate question, and the sugar myth and the seed oil myth take each one apart.

Group 3: processed

A group 1 food with a group 2 ingredient added, usually to make it last longer or taste the way people like it. Canned or bottled vegetables, fruit and beans, canned fish, cheese, and bread made of flour, water, salt and yeast all belong here.

The 2018 NOVA paper also puts salted, pickled, cured or smoked meats in group 3. Plain bacon and ham are processed by NOVA’s rule. The World Health Organization still counts ham as processed meat, the kind its cancer agency links to colorectal cancer, which is one of the clearest signs that the group isn’t a health grade.

Group 4: ultra-processed

A product with at least one ingredient a kitchen doesn’t keep, from either of two lists. The first is substances kitchens rarely use, like high-fructose corn syrup, maltodextrin, dextrose, hydrogenated oils, soy protein isolate, casein and whey protein. The second is cosmetic additives, like flavors, colors, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, sweeteners and thickeners.

The 2019 NOVA paper lists soft drinks, packaged snacks, candy, ice cream, mass-produced packaged breads and buns, margarine, cookies, cakes, breakfast cereals, nuggets, sausages, burgers and hot dogs, and instant soups and noodles. The 2018 paper adds sugared fruit yogurts. In the US these foods make up 53.0% of the calories adults eat, by the CDC’s 2021 to 2023 count.

The foods people get wrong

Every group 3 and 4 line above depends on the label. A peanut butter, a loaf or an oat milk with a different recipe can sit in a different group, which is why the checker shows the deciding ingredient and the label checker lights it up in your own text.

A shelf in four bays

Picture one long store shelf split into four bays. The first bay holds food that looks like it did on the farm, only cleaned, frozen or dried. The second holds the jars and bottles you cook with. In the third, a food from the first bay has met something from the second, like beans with salt in a can or milk with salt turned into cheese.

The fourth bay holds things built in a factory from parts, where at least one part never sits in a home kitchen. You can’t make a whey isolate, a modified starch or an emulsifier at home, and that’s the whole difference between the third bay and the fourth.

The model breaks at the edges. A rotisserie chicken can be bay 3 or bay 4 depending on whether the store added a flavoring or sodium phosphate, and two loaves that look the same can sit in different bays.

How sure is anyone about the groups?

For most foods the call is easy. In a 2022 French study, about 160 food and nutrition specialists sorted 120 labeled products, and a cluster of 90 of them went to group 4 in 91% of calls. Across all the products, though, agreement was low (a Fleiss’ kappa of 0.32), so experts do disagree about the foods in the middle.

The rule this site follows removes most of that doubt. A food is group 4 when its label lists a marker, group 3 when it has a kitchen ingredient added, and group 1 when it has nothing added. We never assign a group from a food’s name alone.

The groups say nothing about nutrition

Packaged whole wheat bread is group 4, and two slices have 3.8 g of fiber against 1.2 g in packaged white bread, which is also group 4 (USDA figures). Bakery sourdough is group 3 with 1.6 g. Bacon is group 3 and whole wheat bread is group 4. The groups describe making, and nothing more, so the tools here put protein, fiber and added sugar beside every group, and processing isn’t the same thing as nutrition explains why we never turn the group into a score.

See your own foods sorted

• Spot the ultra-processed: ten rounds, two foods each. Guess, then see the label.
• The swap ladder: each staple from group 4 down to group 1, with its nutrition.
• What are the four NOVA groups?, the short answer.