It has got genuinely hard
to know what's good.
Not because people stopped caring, but because the food supply changed faster than the labelling did. A packet can be low fat, high protein, fortified with vitamins, and still be something no cook would recognise as food.
This page sets out the distinction that actually matters, explains the terms as it goes, and says plainly where our own products sit — including the parts of the science still being argued over. No prior knowledge needed.
Most of what Britain eats
is no longer food.
Ultra-processed food accounts for roughly 57% of the calories UK adults consume. Not a corner of the diet — the majority of it. And only 17% of us manage five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. Those two figures usually get reported as separate stories, but they are one story: as formulated products took over the plate, plants left it. You cannot fix the second without noticing the first.
30–45 days
45–90+ days
Where things
actually stand.
Three figures worth holding onto — two about the country, one about us. If the Group numbers mean nothing to you yet, the next section explains them.
First, what is the NOVA scale?
It is a way of sorting food by how much it has been messed with, rather than by what is in it. Every nutrition label you have ever read describes contents — fat, sugar, salt, protein. NOVA asks a different question: what was done to this before it reached you?
It was devised in 2009 by Carlos Monteiro, a professor of nutrition and public health at the University of São Paulo, who coined the term 'ultra-processed food'. Brazil built its national dietary guidelines around it, and those guidelines have since been held up by the World Health Organization and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization as an example worth following.
It sorts everything into four groups. Group 1 is food more or less as it grew. Group 2 is the things you cook with — oil, salt, sugar, vinegar. Group 3 is Group 1 and Group 2 combined using old preservation methods. Group 4 is where industry takes over.
Monteiro et al., University of São Paulo
Processed is not the same as ultra-processed
This is where most of the confusion lives, and a lot of marketing takes advantage of it. Chopping is processing. So is cooking, fermenting, milling, pressing and drying. Humans have processed food for as long as there have been humans, and it is largely how we survived winters.
Ultra-processing is a different thing: industrial formulations built from refined extracts and additives — emulsifiers, stabilisers, thickeners, flavourings, colourings, sweeteners — substances you would never find in a domestic kitchen, doing jobs that have nothing to do with nourishment.
The useful question is not has this been processed? It is can you still see the food it came from?
So where do we actually sit?
We will be precise about this rather than vague, because vagueness is how brands get away with things.
Fresh microgreens are Group 1 — unprocessed. Cut, put in a punnet, sent to you.
Big Shot and the Powder are Group 3 — processed food. Whole plants combined with a culinary ingredient and preserved by fermentation. The same category as sourdough, cheddar, sauerkraut and olive oil.
We are not going to pretend our products are unprocessed. We press them, ferment them, and in the case of the Powder dry and mill them. What we do not do is formulate them.
The list of what isn't in it
No maltodextrin. No emulsifiers. No stabilisers or thickeners. No natural flavourings, which despite the name are manufactured. No sweeteners of any kind. No colourings. No preservatives — the acidity of the ferment does that job.
Read the ingredients on any of our products and every single item is something you could buy yourself and recognise on sight. That is the whole test, and it is more useful than anything printed on the front of a pack.
Why we can't be certified organic
A fair question that follows on, and the answer is a quirk of the rules rather than anything about how we farm.
We use microgreen-specific seed — non-treated, GMO-free, organic where we can source it — grow in coco coir, and use no pesticides at any stage. But UK and EU organic certification requires crops to be grown in soil, in connection with the ground beneath. That principle is about soil ecology, and it excludes vertical and soilless growing by definition, whatever your inputs.
We grow in trays, indoors. So certification simply is not open to us. In the United States, the identical farm could be certified.
500
extra calories a day, on a diet matched for sugar, fat, fibre and salt. The only difference was processing.
Most of what you read about ultra-processed food is observational — large populations, self-reported diets, associations rather than proof. This trial was different. Participants lived in a research facility and were given either an ultra-processed or an unprocessed diet, deliberately matched for calories offered, sugar, fat, fibre and sodium. They ate as much or as little as they wanted.
On the ultra-processed diet they ate around 500 more calories a day and gained weight. On the unprocessed diet they lost it. Same nutrients on paper, different outcome in the body.
One small study, and it does not settle the whole debate. But it is the closest thing there is to a controlled test, and it suggests the processing itself changes how much we eat — not merely what the label says.
Where we
draw the line.
This subject attracts a great deal of certainty in every direction. Here is what we think is fair to say, and what is not.
Is ultra-processed food definitely bad for you?
The association is strong and the causation is still being argued about — and we would rather tell you that than join in the shouting.
Most of the evidence is observational: people eating the most ultra-processed food have higher rates of obesity, cardiovascular disease and early death. Observational studies cannot separate the processing itself from everything that travels alongside it, like income, time and access to a kitchen.
But there is one controlled trial worth knowing about, described above. Matched for nutrients, the processing alone still changed how much people ate.
Isn't NOVA a bit of a blunt instrument?
Yes, and its critics have a point. It classifies by processing rather than nutrition, which produces some odd results — a supermarket wholemeal loaf can land in Group 4 while butter sits comfortably in Group 2. It was never designed to tell you whether one item is good or bad.
What it is genuinely useful for is describing a whole diet, and giving people language for something nutrition labels miss entirely. We use it here because it is the clearest framework available, not because it settles every argument.
Are you saying people should never eat ultra-processed food?
No. We sell microgreens, not moral instruction, and anyone claiming a perfect diet is either wealthy, unusually organised, or not being straight with you.
Ultra-processed food is cheap, convenient and often the realistic option when you are tired and it is Wednesday. What we would say is that when the majority of what a country eats comes from that category, the interesting question is not willpower — it is what has happened to the food supply.
Why does any of this matter to a punnet of microgreens?
Because it is why we exist. If you are eating mostly food engineered for shelf life and repeat purchase, the gap in your diet is not calories — it is plants, in a form your body can actually use.
We are not trying to replace anyone's dinner. We are trying to make the most nutrient-dense stage of a plant easy enough to eat that it happens on an ordinary Tuesday.
Read it
yourself.
Links go to the original research and the classification itself, rather than to somebody's summary.
Food you can
still recognise.
Five microgreens we grow ourselves, fermented with apple, ginger, lemon and salt. Or a punnet of living leaves cut the day it goes out. Nothing on either ingredients list needs explaining.
See what we grow →