Is Your Snack Ultra-Processed? A Singapore Shopper's Guide

Walk down any supermarket aisle in Singapore and you will find snacks that look wholesome and snacks that look indulgent — and somewhere online, a comment insisting that both are "ultra-processed". The phrase has travelled from academic journals to everyday conversation in about five years. Most of us using it, though, could not say precisely what it covers.

It is worth knowing, because the term is doing real work in policy debates here. In February 2026, two Members of Parliament asked the Ministry of Health whether Singapore would follow the American lead and rebuild its dietary guidelines around ultra-processed food. MOH's reply is a useful place to start.

Where the term actually comes from

"Ultra-processed" is not a regulatory category, and no Singapore agency puts it on a packet. It comes from the Nova classification, set out by Carlos Monteiro and colleagues, which sorts food by how much industrial processing it has been through rather than by its nutrients. There are four groups:

  • Group 1 — unprocessed or minimally processed. Plants, animals, fungi and water, altered only by drying, grinding, roasting, boiling, chilling, freezing or packing.
  • Group 2 — processed culinary ingredients. Oils, butter, sugar and salt, meant to be cooked with rather than eaten on their own.
  • Group 3 — processed foods. Group 1 foods with salt, oil or sugar added: canned fish, cheese, freshly made bread. Usually two or three ingredients, and still recognisable as the original food.
  • Group 4 — ultra-processed foods. Described in the Nova documentation as "formulations made mostly or entirely from substances derived from foods and additives, with little if any intact" whole food.

The practical markers of Group 4 are ingredients that never appear in a home kitchen — maltodextrin, hydrolysed proteins, invert sugar, soya protein isolate, hydrogenated oils — plus cosmetic additives whose job is to imitate or enhance flavour, colour and texture: dyes, flavourings, flavour enhancers, non-sugar sweeteners, emulsifiers and humectants.

What Singapore's numbers actually look like

In its written parliamentary reply of 3 February 2026, MOH said HPB's latest National Nutrition Survey shows ultra-processed foods account for less than one-third of Singapore residents' total caloric intake. That is meaningfully lower than the United Kingdom and United States, where the same category contributes more than half.

MOH also set out its reasoning for not adding a processing-based rule: "products with higher levels of processing have less favourable nutrient profiles which are characterised by elevated caloric density, excessive nutrients of concern, and reduced dietary fibre and essential vitamins", and existing guidelines already discourage those foods on nutrient grounds. The lever it is pulling instead is industry reformulation through the Healthier Choice Symbol programme — a nutrient-based scheme, not a processing-based one.

What the Singapore evidence says about risk

The largest local dataset on this comes from the Singapore Chinese Health Study, published in Nutrition Journal in September 2025. Researchers followed 62,197 middle-aged and older adults for a median of 24.9 years, during which 29,472 deaths occurred.

Comparing the highest fifth of ultra-processed food intake with the lowest, they found a higher risk of death from all causes (hazard ratio 1.06), cardiovascular disease (1.08) and respiratory disease (1.10). For cancer, there was no association at all (1.00).

Two things are worth holding onto. First, those increases are real but modest, and observational studies show association, not cause. Second — and this is the part the headlines usually skip — the risk was not spread evenly across everything in Group 4. The subgroups linked to higher all-cause mortality were sweetened beverages and sugary products, a category the researchers describe as including crackers and Western cakes. What is in the formulation appears to matter more than the fact that there is a formulation.

Even the experts cannot agree on what belongs in Group 4

If you have ever squinted at a packet and genuinely not known whether it counts, you are in good company. A study in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition asked around 160 to 180 French food and nutrition specialists to sort foods into Nova groups. Agreement between them, measured by Fleiss' kappa, came out at 0.32 and 0.34 — poor, even when the full ingredients list was in front of them. Some foods were sorted almost unanimously; others scattered across all four groups. The authors concluded that the current criteria "do not allow for robust and functional food assignments".

That does not make the concept useless. It does mean "ultra-processed" is a blunt instrument to shop with.

Four questions that beat the buzzword

Turn the packet over and ask these instead:

  1. How long is the ingredients list, and do you recognise most of it? Ingredients are listed by descending weight, so the first three tell you what you are mostly eating.
  2. What is the sodium per 100g? Per 100g lets you compare across brands regardless of pack size.
  3. Is there any fibre or protein? These are what make a snack hold you until dinner. A snack contributing neither is a snack you will want again in an hour.
  4. What do the saturated fat and sugar lines say? These are the nutrients of concern MOH refers to, and they are printed right there.

The Healthier Choice Symbol is a reasonable shortcut when you are in a hurry, since HPB assesses packaged products against nutrient criteria. But nothing on the front of a pack tells you as much as thirty seconds with the back.

Where this leaves your snack shelf

Being straight about it: a cracker that arrives in a sealed bag has been through a factory. We are not going to pretend otherwise, and no amount of nice packaging changes that. What a brand can control is what goes into the formulation and what comes out on the nutrition panel.

That is the standard we hold ourselves to at HexaCrunch. Our crackers are baked, not fried, built on wholegrain brown rice and cricket protein, with an ingredients list short enough to read in one breath and no colours, flavour enhancers or sweeteners doing cosmetic work. If you would like to check the label yourself rather than take our word for it, the Try-All 3-Pack is the easiest place to start.

Sources

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