Soup is one of the categories where the ultra-processed label gets applied lazily. It is a prepared food in a plastic pot, so people assume the worst. Read the back of a chilled tub and it is usually vegetables, stock, a little cream and seasoning — a list you could reproduce on a Sunday.
Every soup below lists no additives. Each was pulled from Open Food Facts, filtered to zero additives, then checked against the live Cull database.
UK soups with no additives
| Product | NOVA | Cull score |
|---|---|---|
| New Covent Garden — Vegetable SoupCarrot, potato, onion, swede, turnip, parsnip, cauliflower | 3 | 72/100 |
| Sainsbury's — Lentil Dhal Soup | 3 | 72/100 |
| Yorkshire Provender — Vegetable & Roast Chicken49% vegetables | 3 | 58/100 |
| New Covent Garden — Classic Chicken | 3 | 58/100 |
| New Covent Garden — Potato & Leek | 3 | 58/100 |
| Yorkshire Provender — Chicken & Lentil with Butternut Squash | 3 | 58/100 |
| New Covent Garden — Tomato & Basil | 3 | 58/100 |
| New Covent Garden — Creamy Tomato | 3 | 57/100 |
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 fresh soup is NOVA 3
Vegetables, lentils and chicken are NOVAgroup 1. Cream, oil and salt are group 2 culinary ingredients. Cooking them together produces group 3 — processed food, and an entirely ordinary place for a cooked dish to sit.
The chilled aisle has an advantage the ambient one does not: refrigeration. A soup that only has to survive a week in a fridge does not need the stabilisers and preservatives that a tin sitting in a warehouse for a year does. The shorter ingredient list is a consequence of the supply chain, not of virtue.
Cornflour is not modified starch
Several soups on this list contain cornflour, and it is worth being precise about why that is fine. Plain cornflour is milled maize starch — a group 3 ingredient, the same thing you would thicken a sauce with at home.
Modified starch is different. It has been chemically or physically altered to gel, thicken or survive freezing in ways plain starch cannot, and it is a genuine group 4 marker because it is an industrial ingredient with no home-kitchen equivalent. The two are one word apart on a label and a whole NOVA group apart in meaning. Our additives guide covers the distinction.
Where soup goes wrong
The soups that are ultra-processed tend to be the shelf-stable and dried ones: modified starch for body, flavourings and flavour enhancers to replace the taste that long processing removes, sometimes colour. Instant and cup soups are the clearest cases.
The other thing to watch has nothing to do with processing. Soup is a common salt trap — it is easy to make a pot taste right with salt, and the scores above move mostly on salt and cream rather than on anything in the ingredient list. A NOVA 3 verdict tells you the soup was cooked rather than formulated. It does not tell you how much salt is in the pot.