M&S’s ‘Only 9 Ingredients White Rolls’, part of a range appealing to consumers who want alternatives to ultra-processed food, has been labelled ultra-processed by an app.
The rolls have been flagged as ultra-processed by The Food App, which aims to make it “easy to avoid ultra-processed foods” by scanning barcodes in store.
“The product contains additives or is industrially processed in a way that we consider clear indicators of an ultra‑processed food,” the app says about the rolls.
The Norwegian app launched in the UK in November last year and has about 30,000 UK users. It uses the internationally recognised Nova classification system, which groups foods into four categories from unprocessed or minimally processed to ultra-processed.
M&S’s Ony 9 Ingredients White Rolls fall into category four, ultra-processed, thanks to the ingredient wheat gluten, according to app founder Tormund Gerhardsen.
“Gluten is naturally occurring in grain, but extra gluten is added to change the structure of the bread and how it behaves, thereby making it an industrial ultra-processed bread,” Gerhardsen told The Grocer.
It is not the first setback for the rolls, which were recently rebranded from ‘Only 5 Ingredients’ to ‘Only 9’ following a complaint to Trading Standards about a mismatch between claims on the front and back of pack. M&S also relabelled two loaves to acknowledge more ingredients following similar complaints by the Real Bread Campaign.
Another app, Open Food Facts, identifies the rolls as processed but not ultra-processed, while low in nutritional quality. However, the crowd-sourced app recognises only the five ingredients originally claimed on the front of pack: ‘multi-four’, water, sourdough culture, yeast and salt. The full nine ingredients now listed on the front of pack are wheatflour, water, rye flour, wheat gluten, fermented wheatflour, yeast, salt, wholemeal wheatflour and durum wheat semolina.
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M&S pitches its Only Ingredients range as using minimal ingredients and “processes as close to the kitchen as possible”. The rolls were among the first products in the range, launched early last year alongside cereals.
M&S doubled the range in January this year with 12 new lines including sausages, chipolatas, burgers and meatballs, the first meat products in the lineup.
M&S head of food innovation Annette Peters said at the time: “It’s about doing things simply and cleanly, and we realised we’d love to move it into areas people really associate with additives and ultra-processed foods, like burgers and sausages and beans and tomato ketchup, where we’ve stripped that right back to normal ingredients.”
The white rolls appear to be the only product in the range classed as UPF by The Food App.
The Nova classification system was developed by epidemiologist Carlos Augusto Monteiro at Brazil’s University of São Paulo to better understand shifting dietary patterns at a population level, but not to evaluate nutritional merits of individual foods.
Gerhardsen acknowledged that a UPF classification in the app did not indicate a product was unhealthy.
“It is not that a particular product isolated is bad for you, but a lot of research is suggesting a diet with a high amount of ultra-processed products can lead to bad health,” he said.
M&S was approached for comment.
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