Glossary
What is NOVA classification?
A system that classifies food by how processed it is — not by its nutrients. Developed by Carlos Monteiro’s team at the University of São Paulo, it sorts everything you eat into four groups.
The four groups.
Group 1Unprocessed / minimally processed
Vegetables, fruit, eggs, meat, milk, plain yogurt, rice, oats. Nothing added; at most cleaned, dried, frozen, or ground.
Group 2Processed culinary ingredients
Oils, butter, sugar, salt — things extracted from group 1 foods and used to cook them.
Group 3Processed foods
Group 1 plus group 2: canned vegetables, cheese, fresh bread, smoked fish. Recognizable food, preserved or transformed.
Group 4Ultra-processed
Industrial formulations with ingredients you don’t keep in a kitchen — sodas, packaged snacks, instant noodles, reconstituted meats, most ready meals.
Why it matters — and its limits.
Large observational studies have repeatedly associated diets high in ultra-processed food with worse health outcomes, and NOVA has been adopted in several national dietary guidelines. It captures something calories and macros miss: two days can match on both and still be very different days.
The honest criticisms are real too. The groups are broad — group 4 spans fortified plant milk and soda alike — edge cases are debated, and much of the evidence is associational. NOVA is a useful direction, not a verdict on any single food.
How Caaals uses it.
Processing is one of the five parts of the daily Quality score — worth 25 of its 100 points, weighted by calories: unprocessed calories keep 100% of their share, minimally processed 90%, processed 60%, ultra-processed 10%. Foods without a NOVA group are left out rather than guessed, and with less than 300 kcal of the day classified, the part drops out and Quality rescales. Direction when the data is there, silence when it isn’t.
Questions
Is all ultra-processed food bad?
No — NOVA is a blunt instrument, and group 4 spans everything from fortified plant milks to soda. Treat it as a direction, not a verdict: large observational studies associate diets high in ultra-processed food with worse health outcomes, but the category is broad and causality is still being worked out.
Where does Caaals get NOVA data?
From the food's database record when it has one — Open Food Facts for scanned and branded foods. For meals logged by text or photo, the AI classifies the processing level, with a keyword fallback. A food that still has no group is left out of the processing part rather than guessed, and if less than 300 kcal of the day is classified, processing drops out of the Quality score and the rest rescales.
Related: how the daily scores work and where the nutrition numbers come from.
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