Ultra-processed food costs three times more. We counted 152 products
The myth goes: healthy food is expensive. We counted the prices of 152 Biedronka products and it came out the other way round. The median price per kilogram of unprocessed food is 9.98 zł. Ultra-processed: 32.23 zł. More than three times as much.
Where the split comes from: the NOVA classification groups food by degree of processing, from raw ingredients (group 1) to ultra-processed products (group 4), the ones with a long ingredient list, emulsifiers and flavourings. In our base of 152 fully-documented products, 33 are group 1 and as many as 75 are group 4.
The two ends of that scale (prices from July 2026)
Group 1, unprocessed:
- Vitanella mountain oat flakes 1 kg: 4.99 zł/kg
- Plony natury roasted buckwheat groats 900 g: 4.94 zł/kg
- Plony natury semolina 500 g: 3.98 zł/kg
- Plony natury red lentils 500 g: 9.98 zł/kg
Group 4, ultra-processed:
- Snickers 50 g: 79.80 zł/kg
- Tic tac orange 18 g: 166.11 zł/kg
- Lindt lindor milk cornet pralines 200 g: 184.95 zł/kg
To be clear: we count złoty per kilogram, not per calorie. Sweets are calorie-dense, so they'd look better per calorie. Except you don't make dinner out of the calories in a candy bar, you make it out of the kilograms in your shopping bag. And for those kilograms, group 4 charges triple.
A swap you can see in your wallet
A daily Snickers at the till is 3.99 zł. A portion of overnight-style oats made in five minutes costs 1.51 zł: 40 g of oat flakes (0.20 zł), 200 ml of milk (0.86 zł), 60 g of Greek yogurt (0.45 zł). The difference is 2.48 zł a day. After a year, around 906 zł. And it isn't a smaller portion: 40 g of oats is the standard serving printed on the package, the same amount our recipe base uses. The oats alone are 145 kcal, more than half a Snickers (the 50 g bar is 240 kcal per the producer's data), with the milk and yogurt still to come.
A bonus you don't see at first: the packages close neatly. A 400 g tub of Greek yogurt is almost a week of portions, a litre of milk is five, a kilo of oats is twenty five. Nothing ends up in the bin.
How to use this at the shelf
You don't need to know the NOVA tables. A simple rule works: the closer to the raw ingredient, the lower the price per kilogram. Groats, oats, legumes and flours build the base of your basket at 4 to 10 zł/kg. Anything with a long ingredient list that crunches out of foil enters the basket at the price of coffee and pralines.
Where these numbers come from
Snugmeal plans a week of meals from close-to-raw products, around your budget and real prices from Polish stores, so this kind of maths is our daily bread. A plan, a shopping list, and a total that matches what you pay at the till.
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Data: zakupy.biedronka.pl, prices checked in July 2026; NOVA classification via Open Food Facts for 152 fully-documented products (shelf products, no fresh). Medians and calculations our own.