There were doubters back in 2010 when the Non-GMO Project said it could certify products that were free of genetically modified ingredients. 15 years later, the same group claims it can develop standards to certify foods that are not ultraprocessed with its “Non-UPF Verified” program.
Maybe not today, but this spring the Non-UPF Verified program (www.nonultraprocessed.org) plans to launch in a pilot phase. Its January announcement implies it will begin a broad discussion with many stakeholders over what is an ultraprocessed food and use that to certify products that are not ultraprocessed.
"We will be testing products under the first edition of our Non-UPF Standard with select brands that have expressed interest," Megan Westgate, founder & CEO of the Non-GMO Project and head of the Non-UPF Verified program, told Food Processing in an email.
"Following this pilot phase, these brands will have the opportunity to decide whether they would like to proceed with verification, potentially becoming the first verified brands available on the shelf. The timeline for this process will be tailored to the specific circumstances of each brand, including factors such as reformulation and packaging print runs," she said.
While the word has been ubiquitous in recent months, there is no agreement on what precisely is ultraprocessed food.
The Non-UPF Verified program says it will build “transparent standards” through:
- A pilot program engaging brands, retailers, health and science practitioners
- Consideration of established frameworks like Nova [more on that later], retail buying policies, recommendations from advisory committees and ongoing research.
- Periodic updates to the standard supported by public and industry comments.
- Clear requirements around banned ingredients and processes.
“This initiative expands beyond GMO avoidance to address an urgent public health crisis: the pervasive dominance of ultraprocessed foods (UPFs) in our global food supply, which now accounts for more than 50% of calories consumed in Western countries,” the founding statement says.
Much of the development will involve the Food Integrity Collective (www.foodintegritycollective.org), launched by the Non-GMO Project to bring together thought leaders and stakeholders across the natural products industry with a goal “to transform the marketplace to prioritize human and environmental health.”
Westgate, who also heads the Food Integrity Collective, repeated a recently coined trope connecting UPFs with the 1980s tobacco companies.
“When tobacco companies acquired major food manufacturers in the 1980s, they deliberately applied their expertise in addiction science to food engineering,” she told us. “The result was a new generation of ultraprocessed foods designed with the same precision as cigarettes to trigger cravings and override our body's natural satiety signals."
That same argument is the basis of the first lawsuit on the harm of UPFs. Kraft Heinz, Mondelez, Post, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, Nestle USA, Kellanova, WK Kellogg, Mars and Conagra were defendants in a lawsuit filed in Philadelphia.
A couple things certainly are true. From consumers all the way up to leaders of the FDA, there is an acknowledgement that heavily processed and chemical-laden foods have some connection to obesity and various health problems. And while consumers are catching on, "Even the most informed consumers struggle to identify ultraprocessed foods consistently," notes Westgate.
According to the Non-GMO Project's 2024 research with Linkage, 85% of shoppers want to avoid UPFs, but they may feel overwhelmed and unsupported in this goal.
"When we began addressing GMOs in 2007, we recognized that genetic engineering was just one way industrial food production was distancing us from natural ingredients," Westgate continues. "Today's ultraprocessed foods represent an even deeper departure — taking familiar ingredients and transforming them so fundamentally that our bodies no longer recognize them as food.”
The new certification will complement the Non-GMO Project’s Butterfly seal, which the group says is found on more than 63,000 products from more than 5,000 food brands, representing $47 billion in annual sales.
The Nova Classification
The word “ultraprocessed” seems to appear first in a 2009 paper from Carlos Augusto Monteiro and other researchers at University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. It later came to be called the Nova Classification system. Monteiro’s research into malnutrition in Brazil led him to classify foods into four groups:
- Unprocessed or minimally processed foods
- Processed culinary ingredients
- Processed foods
- Ultraprocessed foods
The last group relies heavily on sugar, oils, fats and salt, especially when they themselves are in highly processed forms (such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, modified starches and protein isolates). The Brazilian paper and subsequent research implies increasing health problems with higher levels of processing.