Snacks covers shelf-stable savory packaged foods: potato chips, tortilla chips, pretzels, crackers, popcorn, rice cakes, cheese puffs, and snack mixes. Most entries in this category are NOVA 4 ultra-processed foods, though there are meaningful differences in quality between, say, air-popped popcorn and fried-and-flavored chips.
Snacks are not a dietary necessity but they are a cultural staple. The USDA DGA does not recommend specific snack foods but does emphasize limiting added sugar, sodium, and saturated fat — three things snacks often deliver in concentrated form. Programmatic scoring exposes the wide score spread within this category and identifies the few entries that genuinely hold up.
Air-popped popcorn, lightly salted nuts, and rice-based crackers with short ingredient lists can score 60+. Most branded chips, cheese puffs, and flavored crackers sit in the 30-50 range because of oil, salt, and NOVA 4 classification. Anything with artificial flavors, MSG, or hydrogenated oil drops below 35.