Crisps are the food most people assume must be ultra-processed, and for the flavoured bags they are right. But a plain salted crisp is potato, oil and salt — and by the standards of the NOVA system that is a group 3 food, the same group as tinned tomatoes and cured ham.
This is a roundup with an unusual honesty problem, so it is worth stating up front: none of the products below contains an additive, and none of them scores above 44. Both of those things are true at once, and a list that only told you the first half would be misleading.
UK crisps with no additives
| Product | NOVA | Cull score |
|---|---|---|
| Kettle — ChipsPotatoes, sunflower oil, sea salt | 3 | 44/100 |
| Tesco — Tortilla ChipsMaize flour, rapeseed oil, salt | 3 | 44/100 |
| Stockwell & Co. — Tortilla Chips | 3 | 44/100 |
| Sainsbury's — Tortilla Chips | 3 | 44/100 |
| Tesco Finest — Ready Salted CrispsPotato, sunflower oil, sea salt | 3 | 28/100 |
| Tesco Finest — Lightly Sea Salted Hand Cooked Crisps | 3 | 28/100 |
| Seabrook — Sea Salted Potato Crisps | 3 | 28/100 |
Checked 31 July 2026against Open Food Facts and the live Cull database. Recipes change without notice and supermarket own-brands are reformulated regularly — scan the pack in front of you rather than trusting any list, including this one. Scores are Cull's own standard, not an official rating.
Why plain crisps are not ultra-processed
Slice a potato, fry it in oil, add salt. The potato is NOVA group 1, the oil and salt are group 2 culinary ingredients, and combining them gives you group 3 — processed food. There is no marker of industrial formulation anywhere in that bag.
Group 3 is not a loophole and it is not a pass. It is the honest classification for something made from recognisable ingredients by a method you could describe to a child. Whether you should eat a lot of it is a completely different question, and NOVA has never claimed to answer that one.
Where the flavoured bags go wrong
Turn over a bag of cheese and onion and you will not find much cheese or onion. You will find flavourings — and frequently flavour enhancers, and sometimes colours. Every one of those is a group 4 marker, because their only job is to make a formulation taste and look like something it is not.
That is the whole difference between the two halves of the crisp aisle. Not the frying, not the salt, not the fat: the flavour system. Our additives guide explains which classes count and which do not, and our full guide to crisps works through the category.
Additive-free is not a health claim
Scores of 28 to 44 across a list where every product has a clean label. Nothing has gone wrong with the scoring — crisps are fried, salted and easy to eat a lot of, and a nutrition score is supposed to notice that.
We could have left this roundup out on the grounds that it does not flatter the “no additives” framing. It is more useful as the corrective. If your method for choosing food is counting E numbers, this list is what that method recommends for dinner. Cull reports nutrition, additive risk and processing separately precisely so that a bag of crisps cannot pass as a good choice on the strength of a three-word ingredient list.
The genuinely useful takeaway is narrower and more practical: if you are buying crisps anyway, the plain salted bag is meaningfully less processed than the flavoured one next to it, and it is usually cheaper.