Jarred pasta sauce has a worse reputation than it deserves. It is convenience food, it sits in the middle aisles, and people assume the rest. But read the back of a decent jar and it is tomatoes, tomato purée, onion, olive oil, herbs, salt and a little sugar — a list you could reproduce at home.
Every sauce below lists no additives at all. All were pulled from Open Food Facts, filtered to zero additives, then checked against the live Cull database.
UK pasta sauces with no additives
| Product | NOVA | Cull score |
|---|---|---|
| Heinz — Sun-Ripened Cherry Tomato & BasilTomato 75%, then vegetables, olive oil and herbs | 3 | 72/100 |
| Heinz — Tomato & Chilli ArrabbiataTomato 80% | 3 | 72/100 |
| Heinz — Tomato Sauce for Bolognese | 3 | 72/100 |
| Heinz — Sundried Cherry Tomato & Basil | 3 | 72/100 |
| Loyd Grossman — Tomato & Roasted Garlic | 3 | 72/100 |
| Heinz — Tomato, Grana Padano & Mascarpone | 3 | 58/100 |
| Loyd Grossman — Tomato & Basil | 3 | 44/100 |
| Tesco — Bolognese Pasta Sauce | 3 | 44/100 |
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 these are NOVA 3, not NOVA 4
Under NOVA, tomatoes, onion and herbs are group 1. Olive oil, salt and sugar are group 2 culinary ingredients. Cook them together and you have group 3 — processed food, the category that has always contained preserved and prepared foods made from recognisable things.
Sugar surprises people here. A jar listing sugar is not ultra-processed because of it: sugar is the archetypal group 2 ingredient, exactly like the salt in bread. It might still be more sugar than you want, and that is what the score is for. The two jars scoring 44 on this list are not more processed than the ones scoring 72 — they are saltier and sweeter.
What pushes a sauce into group 4
The jars that are genuinely ultra-processed announce it. Look for modified starch, flavourings, or an emulsifier system holding a creamy sauce together. Cheese-and-cream sauces reach group 4 far more often than tomato ones, because keeping dairy stable in a jar at room temperature is a formulation problem in a way that tomato is not.
A useful shortcut on this shelf: the higher the tomato percentage, the shorter the rest of the list tends to be. The 80%-tomato arrabbiata on this list scores 72; sauces that lead with water and thickener do not appear on it at all. Our additives guide covers which classes to look for, and our full guide to pasta sauce works through the category.
The comparison that actually matters
Homemade sauce from tinned tomatoes will usually beat any jar on salt and sugar, and it costs less. That is true and worth saying.
It is also not the choice most people are making at 7pm. The real comparison is a NOVA 3 jar against a ready meal or a takeaway, and on that comparison the jar wins comfortably. Food advice that only works for people with time to cook is not advice, and treating a jar of tomatoes and basil as a failure is the kind of thing that makes people give up on the whole idea.