The eco–ultraprocessing paradox as evidence for a Tech–Nutri–Eco coherence framework in plant-based food sustainability governance

Plant-based foods are widely promoted as sustainable, yet a large share are ultra-processed — a tension that current assessment instruments cannot detect. NOVA, Nutri-score, and eco-score each evaluate a single dimension in isolation and share no criterion for reconciling them, so a product may score favourably on one while remaining unreconciled across the others. The absence of such a criterion is directly consequential for EU directive 2024/825, which requires environmental claims to be verifiable but sets no requirement of coherence across dimensions. The sustainability of a processed food product cannot be read from strong performance on any single dimension: coherence among the technological, nutritional, and environmental dimensions is a separate property, and one that current instruments do not assess. A synthesis of 2015–2025 literature yields 10 recurrent incoherence patterns in four structural families — metric reductionism, fragmented communication, scale and category errors, and pseudo-integration — from which we propose the Tech–Nutri–Eco framework and its operational measure, the integrated COherence iNdex (ICON), as a non-normative diagnostic. Applied to 49 plant-based products, ICON locates what we term the eco–ultraprocessing paradox — ultra-processed products with favourable nutritional or environmental scores — in 57% of the set, most often in plant-based drinks and in dairy and meat alternatives. NOVA 4 products showed markedly lower coherence than the rest (mean ICON 0.19 vs. 0.55; U = 43.0, p < 0.001), a separation that follows from the construction of the index. Coherence assessment offers regulators a means of exposing selective sustainability claims that single-dimension labelling leaves intact.