Evidence & Approach

Food can be viewed through many different lenses, including nutrition, ingredients, processing, cost, culture, convenience, and personal preference.

Unwrap focuses on food processing as one of those lenses.

This means looking at how a product is made, what role its ingredients play, and whether those ingredients are typically associated with home cooking or industrial food production.

The aim is to add context, not judgement.

Unwrap draws on publicly available data and widely referenced frameworks:

Nutrition science is complex and evolving, and different tools may interpret food through different lenses.

When Unwrap highlights ingredients, this does not mean they are unsafe or harmful.

The focus is on why an ingredient is used, whether it is common in home cooking, and whether it is typically associated with industrial processing.

Many ingredients used in modern food production are approved for use and considered safe within regulatory limits. Unwrap does not assess health outcomes, only processing context.

For transparency, Unwrap maintains a full Ingredient Processing Index.

This reference explains what ingredients are commonly used for, how they function in food production, and why they may be considered processing markers.

Inclusion in this index does not imply harm or that the ingredient should be avoided.

When you scan a product, Unwrap reads its ingredient list and checks each ingredient against a set of processing rules.

Each rule looks for a specific ingredient or class of ingredients that are typically associated with industrial food production rather than home cooking — things like artificial sweeteners, emulsifiers, flavour enhancers, and hydrogenated fats.

Every matched ingredient counts as one "flag". The score you see is simply the total number of flagged ingredients found in that product.

A score of 0 means no processing markers were found. A higher score means more were detected. The score is not a health rating — it is a transparency tool to help you understand what is in the product.

There are lots of great tools that help people understand food in different ways. Unwrap is designed to complement them, not compete with them. Here are some we think are worth knowing about:

Each app takes a different approach. We think the more tools people have, the better.