Peanut butter is the clearest shelf in the supermarket for seeing how the NOVA system actually works. The whole range, from a jar containing one ingredient to a jar containing three, sits between group 1 and group 3 — and none of the products below contains a single additive.
Every jar was pulled from Open Food Facts, filtered to zero additives, then checked against the live Cull database. Each row links to its product page.
UK peanut butters with no additives
| Product | NOVA | Cull score |
|---|---|---|
| Meridian — Crunchy Peanut ButterRoasted peanuts, 100%. Nothing else | 1 | 90/100 |
| Meridian — Smooth Peanut ButterRoasted peanuts, 100% | 1 | 90/100 |
| Aldi Grandessa — Crunchy Peanut ButterPeanuts, 100% | 1 | 90/100 |
| Pip & Nut — Crunchy Peanut ButterPeanuts 99.4%, sea salt | 3 | 49/100 |
| Pip & Nut — Smooth Peanut ButterPeanuts 99.5%, sea salt | 3 | 49/100 |
| Whole Earth — Crunchy Peanut ButterPeanuts 97%, palm oil, sea salt | 3 | 44/100 |
| Whole Earth — Smooth Organic Peanut ButterOrganic peanuts 91%, palm oil, sea salt | 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.
One ingredient, two ingredients, three
The three tiers in that table are a better explanation of NOVA than most articles about it.
- 100% peanuts— group 1. Roasting and grinding are minimal processes, and nothing has been added.
- Peanuts and salt— group 3. Salt is a group 2 culinary ingredient, and adding one to a group 1 food produces a group 3 food. Two ingredients, still nowhere near ultra-processed.
- Peanuts, palm oil and salt— still group 3. Oil is another group 2 ingredient. Adding it does not change the classification.
Nothing here reaches group 4, because reaching group 4 needs a marker of industrial formulation: an emulsifier doing a formulation's work, a flavouring, a sweetener, a modified starch. The peanut butters that dohit group 4 are the ones with icing sugar, hydrogenated fat and emulsifiers in them — and they announce themselves on the label.
The palm oil question is not a NOVA question
“No palm oil” is one of the most-searched things about peanut butter, and it is worth separating from ultra-processing entirely. Palm oil in a peanut butter is there to stop the natural oil rising to the top — it is a texture fix, and it is a plain culinary oil, not an additive.
There are real reasons to avoid it: sustainability, and the saturated fat it adds. Those are good arguments and they stand on their own. What palm oil is not is evidence of ultra-processing, and conflating the two makes both arguments weaker.
Why the clean jars score so differently
Look at the range: 90 for the 100% jars, 49 with salt, 44 with salt and palm oil. Every one of them is additive-free, and there is a 46-point spread.
That gap is not the additives, because there are none. It is salt and saturated fat, which is what a nutrition score is supposed to notice. This is the argument for scoring nutrition and processing separately rather than folding them into one number: a jar can have a perfect ingredient list and still be a salty, fatty thing you eat by the spoonful. Both facts are useful; neither replaces the other.
See the additives guide for which ingredient classes actually signal ultra-processing, and our other shopping lists for the same treatment across bread, yoghurt and cereal.