The yoghurt aisle is one of the few places where the additive-free option is the default rather than the exception. Plain natural yoghurt is milk and bacterial cultures. That is the whole recipe, and it is the same recipe whether you buy the £4 Greek pot or the supermarket own-brand next to it.
Every product below lists nothing but milk and cultures. Each was pulled from Open Food Facts, filtered to zero additives, then checked against the live Cull database — the rows link to the product pages so you can see the data yourself.
UK yoghurts with no additives
| Product | NOVA | Cull score |
|---|---|---|
| Fage — Total 0% FatSkimmed milk and five cultures | 1 | 90/100 |
| Aldi Brooklea — Greek 0% Fat Authentic Greek Yogurt | 1 | 90/100 |
| Fage — Total 5% Fat | 1 | 72/100 |
| Yeo Valley — Organic YogurtOrganic milk and one live culture | 1 | 72/100 |
| Yeo Valley — Greek Style Natural Yoghurt | 1 | 55/100 |
| Tesco — Greek Style Yogurt | 1 | 55/100 |
| Lidl Milbona — Creamy Greek Style Natural Yogurt | 1 | 55/100 |
| Aldi Brooklea — Greek 10% Fat Authentic Yogurt | 1 | 55/100 |
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 yoghurt is NOVA 1
Plain yoghurt sits in NOVAgroup 1 — unprocessed or minimally processed — which surprises people who assume any manufactured product must be further up the scale. The reason is in the definition: group 1 covers foods altered only by processes such as drying, freezing, pasteurisation and non-alcoholic fermentation, with nothing added.
Culturing milk is exactly that. Nothing is added, one thing happens, and the result is still milk in the way NOVA cares about. Compare it to bread, which lands in group 3 the moment salt goes in — salt being a group 2 culinary ingredient. Plain yoghurt does not even take that step.
Where the yoghurt aisle goes wrong
The jump from group 1 to group 4 happens in a single move: flavour it. Fruit-corner pots, children's yoghurts and most “low fat” flavoured tubs carry flavourings, colours, modified starch or non-sugar sweeteners, and any one of those is a group 4 marker. The plain and flavoured versions of the same brand routinely sit at opposite ends of the classification.
This is the clearest illustration on any supermarket shelf of why NOVA classifies products rather than categories. “Is yoghurt ultra-processed?” has no answer. The pot in your hand does.
What the scores tell you that the ingredient list does not
Look at the range above: 55 to 90, across products whose ingredient lists are effectively identical. Nothing separates them but fat, and in the case of the 0% versions, a protein-to-calorie ratio that scores well.
That gap is the argument for not treating “no additives” as a verdict. It is a genuinely useful fact — it tells you the product was not formulated — and it is silent on everything else. Cull scores nutrition, additive risk and processing separately so that a clean label cannot hide a poor nutritional profile, and a NOVA 4 verdict cannot condemn a fortified product that is doing something useful.
If you want the full picture on which additives matter and which do not, our additives guide covers the classes.