We’ve been through the supermarket shelves and kept only the whole foods and their minimally processed equivalents. Where an ingredient shows no product, none exists without additives, so we give you the recipe to make it yourself.
Unprocessed Eats ranks real supermarket products by the NOVA food-processing scale and fails anything whose label lists a numbered additive, added sugar, flavouring or emulsifier, so you can see the whole-food or minimally processed option for every ingredient in a meal.
We break it into the ingredients you’d buy, then rank the real products on the shelf by how little has been done to the food. Cheapest wins a tie. No brand pays to be here.
We use the NOVA classification from the University of São Paulo. Group 1 is a whole food or one that has only been cleaned, cut, dried, frozen or pasteurised. Group 2 is a culinary ingredient pressed or extracted from a whole food, like olive oil, salt or honey. Group 3 is a few of those combined, like cheese or tinned beans in brine. Group 4 is ultra-processed. We show groups 1 to 3 and rank group 1 first.
Any numbered additive on the label (colours, preservatives, acidity regulators, gums, modified starches, raising agents, flavour enhancers, sweeteners), plus anything named as a flavouring, emulsifier or lecithin, and added sugars. We read the retailer's published ingredients panel and print it verbatim so you can check our working.
Because added sugar is one of the things the rule fails a product for, sugar as an ingredient fails too. Honey and pure maple syrup pass as group 2 culinary ingredients. This is a deliberate choice about what we recommend, not a claim that sugar is an additive.
Under NOVA a refined seed oil is a group 2 culinary ingredient, the same group as olive oil, so it does not make a food ultra-processed. We still cap any product containing canola, sunflower, soybean, rice bran, palm or unspecified vegetable oil at amber and say which oil it is, so you can decide. That cap is our position, not a research finding.
Every price comes from a single supermarket on the date shown on the page, so there will be variation across other stores and regions, and prices move between our checks. Each product links to its page on the retailer's site for today's price, and services like grocer.nz show the price at your local store.
If your product is a whole food or additive-free, it may be that it is not sold at general supermarkets, or not at the store we checked. If we have missed something, email us at hello@phasefood.com.
We only say it when we found the product category on the shelf, read the ingredients panel on every product in it, and every one failed. If any panel was missing or unreadable we say we cannot call it instead. Where nothing passes, PhaseFood gives you the recipe to make it yourself.
No. Products are ranked by how little has been done to the food, then by how few ingredients, then by price. No brand has paid for placement and none can.