UPF Hero Autor: msibley

UPF Hero rates how ultra-processed a food is, using the ingredients list published on the page you are viewing. It works on most supermarket product pages and other website recipe pages.

WHAT IT SHOWS

Three scores, each from 0 to 100:

• Processing: from the additives, industrial markers, ingredient list length and NOVA group of the list as published.
• Nutrition: from the UK Food Standards Agency front-of-pack concentration bands for fat, saturates, sugars and salt.
• Overall: combining the two at 60 per cent processing to 40 per cent nutrition.

Each score can be opened to see how it was reached. Additives are listed with their E-number, their function in the food, and the points they deducted. Ingredients are listed in the order the page gives them, with
additives marked.

SUPERMARKET PRODUCT PAGES

Clicking the toolbar button on a product page shows the rating in the popup. Because the popup closes as soon as the page is clicked, the rating can instead be pinned to the page, where it remains while you
browse.

RECIPE PAGES

Where a recipe publishes its own nutrition figures, those are used. Where it does not, the ingredients are weighed against a food composition table and the finished dish is estimated. Estimated figures are marked as estimates wherever they appear, and an estimate is refused rather than guessed when an ingredient weight cannot be established.

Recipe quantities can be displayed in metric or US customary measures.

PER-SITE WATCHING

A site can be granted permission to be watched automatically, in which case products are rated as you browse and a badge appears in the corner of the page. Sites are granted one at a time and can be revoked at any time. A fresh install has permission to read no site.

PRIVACY

UPF Hero makes no network requests. It contains no code capable of making one and loads no remote code. The additive and food composition data are compiled into the add-on at build time. Settings are stored locally in the browser.

No personal data, browsing history, page addresses or scores are collected, transmitted or shared.

WHICH SITES IT WORKS ON

UPF Hero reads a page by its structure rather than from a list of approved sites, so it works on any page that publishes an ingredients list. There is nothing to configure and no site list to keep up to date.

It was built and tested against UK retailers first. The test suite covers Tesco, Ocado and Co-op alongside around 1000 real recipe pages taken from recipe sites.

Several US retailers are covered as well, among them Target, Walmart,
Wegmans, Instacart and Amazon. US coverage is narrower than UK coverage and some pages will not be read.

Where a page cannot be read, UPF Hero says so rather than guessing.

DATA SOURCES

Additive data derives from Open Food Facts, used under the ODbL. Food composition data comes from USDA FoodData Central, SR Legacy. The nutrition bands are the UK Food Standards Agency front-of-pack
thresholds.

LIMITATIONS

Scores are derived from what a page publishes. Where an ingredients list is absent or incomplete, UPF Hero reports that rather than producing a number. It is an information tool and is not medical or nutritional
advice.