Short answer: no.
Packaging has nothing to do with whether a food is ultra-processed. A can of tomatoes is not the same thing as a can of Pringles just because they're both in a can.
Having that thought makes sense though. Between RFK, food documentaries, and every health influencer on your social media feed, “ultra-processed” has become a catch-all alarm word, and most of the foods people associate with it come in packages.
But the package is just a container. What matters is what’s inside and how it was made.
Think about it this way.
Food has been packaged for centuries.
Flour comes in bags.
Rice comes in sacks.
Olive oil comes in bottles.
Beans come in cans.
None of these foods are ultra-processed.
Packaging simply protects food and extends shelf life. It says nothing about how the food itself was made.
Most of us who start cleaning up our diet end up in the same place, trying to find the simplest possible rule we can follow at the grocery store.
And “just avoid all packaged foods” feels tempting. Grab your veggies straight from the soil, get your fish from the lake closest to you, milk your friendly farmer’s cow. You get the gist.
In a perfect world, sure. But it’s not necessary, and it would honestly make your life harder for no reason.
What matters is the level of processing.
Most packaged foods are technically processed, because some step has been taken to prepare or preserve them.
Freezing vegetables is processing.
Grinding wheat into flour is processing.
Canning tomatoes is processing.
Processing simply means a food has been altered from its original state in some way.
The important distinction is how much processing happened and why. Some processing preserves food or makes it easier to cook. Ultra-processing goes much further by reformulating foods with industrial ingredients designed to change flavor, texture, and shelf life.
That's exactly what the NOVA system breaks down.
The system most researchers use to talk about food processing is called the NOVA classification system. It groups foods based on how much they’ve been processed and why.
Group 1: Unprocessed or minimally processed foods.
Fresh fruit, plain frozen vegetables, eggs, plain meat, dried lentils, canned beans with nothing added. These foods might be cleaned, cut, frozen, or dried, but nothing was added that fundamentally changes them.
Group 2: Processed culinary ingredients.
Like olive oil, butter, flour, salt, sugar, vinegar.
Things you cook with, not eat straight from the package. They're made from Group 1 foods through simple processes like pressing, refining, or milling.
Group 3: Processed foods
This is where you get things like canned fish in olive oil, cheese, cured meats, freshly baked bread from a bakery, or jarred olives. These combine ingredients from Groups 1 and 2 using traditional preservation or cooking methods.
Group 4: Ultra-processed foods.
This is the category people are usually talking about when they warn about processed foods.
These aren’t simply cooked or preserved versions of real food. They are products that have been industrialized and reformulated using ingredients you would rarely use in a home kitchen.
Common ingredients in ultra-processed foods include:
Artificial flavors
Emulsifiers
Stabilizers
Color additives
Flavor enhancers
Modified starches
Protein isolates
The goal is to create foods that are:
- extremely convenient
- intensely flavorful
- long shelf-life
- very easy to overeat
Many everyday foods come in packages but are still very close to their natural form.
Processing itself is not the enemy. Washing, freezing, grinding, drying, fermenting, and cooking are all forms of processing that humans have used for generations.
Canned and jarred basics. Canned tomatoes (just tomatoes, maybe citric acid). Canned chickpeas or black beans (beans, water, salt). Canned tuna or sardines in water or olive oil. Jarred olives. These are preserved versions of real food. The can is doing the same job your fridge would do if you bought fresh.
Frozen vegetables and fruit. Frozen edamame, frozen spinach, frozen mango chunks. As long as the ingredient list is just the vegetable or fruit itself (sometimes with salt), you're looking at minimally processed food.
I’ve read these are typically flash-frozen shortly after harvest, on the farm or a nearby processing facility.
Plain dairy. Full-fat yogurt with two ingredients (milk, live cultures) is processed food in the traditional sense, not ultra-processed. Same with plain cheese that lists milk, salt, cultures, and an enzyme. The ultra-processed versions appear when you get flavored yogurts full of additives or “cheese products” that can’t legally call themselves cheese.
Minimally processed grains and legumes. Rolled oats in a cardboard canister. Dried pasta made from durum wheat semolina and water. Brown rice in a bag. Dried lentils. These go through industrial processes but nothing is added that changes what they fundamentally are.
Some condiments and oils. Cold-pressed olive oil. Apple cider vinegar. Soy sauce (check the label, traditionally made soy sauce is water, soybeans, wheat, salt; the ultra-processed version adds caramel color, corn syrup, and "natural flavors"). Dijon mustard with just mustard seeds, vinegar, salt, and spices.
Now let’s look at the other side.
These foods are typically heavily reformulated using industrial ingredients.
Examples include:
flavored chips
candy bars
packaged snack cakes
sugary breakfast cereals
soda and energy drinks
instant noodles
many protein bars
frozen ready meals
You’ll often see long ingredient lists filled with additives designed to improve flavor, texture, and shelf life. And this is where label reading becomes useful.
Ultra-processed foods tend to have ingredients that fall into two categories.
The first category includes substances extracted from real foods and refined far beyond anything you’d normally use in a kitchen, things like high-fructose corn syrup, maltodextrin, soy protein isolate, modified starch, or partially hydrogenated oils.
The second is additives with no equivalent in home cooking i.e emulsifiers, stabilizers, artificial colors, "natural flavors" (which is doing a lot of heavy lifting), flavor enhancers.
The purpose of these ingredients is usually the same: make food cheaper to produce, last longer on shelves, and taste more appealing.
See them as engineering choices, not cooking choices.
When I’m standing in the aisle trying to decide whether something is ultra-processed, I do one quick thing.
I read the ingredient list.
If the ingredients look like things you would actually cook with at home, the food is usually fine.
And if the ingredient list is full of substances you wouldn’t normally cook with at home, it’s probably ultra-processed.
I walk through this simple method here: How to Tell If a Food Is Ultra-Processed.
Once you learn this trick, grocery shopping gets dramatically easier.
Some foods genuinely live in the gray area.
Bread. A sourdough loaf from a neighbourhood bakery is probably not ultra-processed. A packaged loaf with 25 ingredients and a two-week shelf life almost certainly is. But there are packaged breads in the middle, made with flour, water, yeast, salt, and maybe an oil, that are closer to Group 3. Ingredient lists matter here.
Plant-based milks. A simple soy milk made with soybeans, water, and maybe salt is very different from versions that add oils, gums, and flavor additives. Same category of product, very different levels of processing.
Protein bars. Almost universally ultra-processed, even the ones marketed toward health-conscious people. The "cleaner" ones sometimes have shorter ingredient lists but still use soy protein isolate, sugar alcohols, and a roster of additives that push them firmly into Group 4.
When you run into these middle-ground foods, comparing brands helps a lot. One product might have five ingredients while another has fifteen. The difference becomes obvious pretty quickly.
My goal is not to eliminate every packaged food.
That would make life unnecessarily complicated.
The goal is to reduce foods that are heavily engineered to make us overeat.
When you shift your grocery cart toward foods with simple ingredients, a lot of things start changing naturally:
- meals become more filling
- cravings settle down
- energy becomes more stable
- weight loss often becomes easier
That’s the path I’m experimenting with myself as I work on losing 80 pounds.
And I’m learning this stuff right alongside you.
The 80/20 approach I use isn’t about finding a perfect, clean version of every food. It’s about knowing which packaged products are genuinely fine, which are clearly not, and spending energy on the “clearly not” ones rather than stressing over a can of chickpeas.