Less Sugar Should Not Mean More Processing

August 12, 2026

By Sarah Tobin

Last updated: August 18, 2026
Reading time: 14 min
A balance scale with a single sugar cube on one side and a tray of glass vials and capsules filled with pale synthetic liquid on the other, the vials outweighing the sugar cube.

Big food has a fix for less sugar. More processing.

This summer, one of the world’s largest ingredient suppliers launched an AI tool built to solve the taste and texture problems cutting sugar creates... by adding more processed ingredients back in. It launched at a strange moment to make that bet. The health harms of ultra-processed food are well documented, consumers are asking for less processing, and regulators are moving toward defining and restricting it. Confoundingly, the industry’s answer, so far, is a faster way to make more of it. That dependence runs deep: food company executives recently lobbied the White House to delay the government’s first official definition of ultra-processed food.

Consumers want less sugar. They also want less processing. Cutting sugar by adding more processing meets one demand and breaks the other. Big Food is solving this backward, choosing the easy fix of adding back the ingredients consumers are cutting sugar to avoid, instead of reformulating with real food. This piece shows why, using the research and Merricks Kitchen as proof.

Brekky Mix Non UPF Verified Low Sugar Granola

Inside Their Fix

Ingredion launched a new AI tool this summer called Ask Ingredion. Ingredion is one of the world's largest ingredient suppliers, so when they build something, other manufacturers pay attention. Their worry is that drinks turn thin. Baked goods lose their overly sweet taste. Protein-fortified foods turn gritty or chalky. The system feeds formulation questions into AI built on the company's own research, and it recommends which additive to add in to replace the texture sugar used to provide. Patrick Kalotis, the company's EVP of Textures and Healthful Solutions, described the underlying challenge in plain terms: removing sugar "can change texture at a molecular level."

I want to be clear before I go further. This is not really about Ingredion. They are one company doing what most of the industry does, and they happen to have been the most recent, most public example of it.

So the fix for cutting sugar is more processed ingredients, recommended by AI instead of scientists, dietitians, or doctors. It is also the cheaper path. Reformulating with real ingredients costs more and takes longer than generating a substitute additive, and that math is exactly why the industry keeps choosing it.

I have spent years building Merricks Kitchen on the opposite premise, and I will use it as a case study throughout this piece because I think the industry needs proof this approach works, not just an argument that it should.

The Low-Sugar Fix That Isn't a Fix

Sugar reduction has become a mandate across the food industry. GLP-1 medication use is changing how much people eat. Regulation is tightening. Shoppers are asking for it. Companies know they need to cut sugar, but they are struggling with how to do so without losing the mouthfeel people expect, so they reach for emulsifiers, texturizers, gums, and synthetic sweeteners instead.

That pattern already has a track record, and it is not a good one. When Chile's food labeling law required manufacturers to cut sugar, researchers tracked what replaced it in packaged foods. Non-nutritive sweetener use in products marketed to children, drinks, dairy, yogurt, and desserts, rose from 37.9 percent to 43.6 percent, a 15 percent relative increase (Frontiers in Nutrition, 2021). Separately, a 2025 study of more than 123,000 UK Biobank participants found that people who drank low- and non-sugar-sweetened beverages had a 60 percent higher risk of metabolic liver disease, and a higher risk of liver-related death, than those who avoided them (UEG Week, October 2025). Two different bodies of research, same pattern. The sugar came out. Again, something else, plausibly riskier, went in.

An AI tool just makes that same swap faster. It does not make the swap safer.


What the Science Actually Shows

The Lancet published a three-paper series on ultra-processed foods in November 2025, and the findings ran counter to the whole reformulation strategy. Forty-three international experts contributed to the series, and together they linked ultra-processed food intake to 12 separate chronic health conditions. Study author Chris van Tulleken, at University College London, said it about as directly as a scientist can: "When you adjust for reformulation, the health outcomes remain the same."

His point is specific. Researchers compared two groups: people eating a reformulated ultra-processed product, where sugar had been reduced and replaced with another processed ingredient, and people eating the original, unreformulated version. The rates of chronic disease the series tracked came out roughly the same in both groups. Swapping one processed ingredient for another changed the label. It did not change what happened in the body.

Carlos Monteiro, the researcher who developed the Nova food classification system, has a rule of thumb worth remembering the next time a box brags about extra protein or fiber on the front: "When you have a food that has claims, it's very likely it's ultra-processed." Fortification on its own is not the problem. The problem is that a claim gives people permission to eat more of a product that is still, underneath the marketing, heavily processed.

This is exactly the playbook at work with sugar reduction. A company drops sugar from 8 grams to 6 grams, adds a claim like "25% less sugar" to the front of the pack, and lets the number do the persuading. What the claim does not say is what filled the gap: a gum for viscosity, a starch for mouthfeel, a sweetener to cover the flavor loss. The claim is accurate. It is also incomplete, and incomplete in a way that is easy to miss unless you turn the package over.

None of this is new. Big food has spent decades muddying the relationship between what a product claims and what its ingredient list actually contains, wrapping formulations in health halos, low-fat, high-protein, now reduced-sugar, while the ingredients doing the work underneath rarely make it onto the front of the pack. The claim changes. The playbook does not.

Ultra-processed foods already account for 55 percent of daily calories among Americans, and meaningfully more among children and teenagers, between 61 and 65 percent, according to the CDC's most recent national data (August 2025). Trading one processed ingredient for another does not move that number. See our breakdown of the ultra-processed food research for the full picture.

Why the Ingredient List Matters More Than Ever

The ingredient list is still the most honest part of the package, because it has to list everything, in order, by weight. Length alone does not tell you much. A short list can still be built on gums and isolates, and a longer list can be nothing but whole foods, twelve or fifteen ingredients you would recognize in your own kitchen. What matters is not how many ingredients are there, but whether you know what each one is and why it is there. Read down the list and ask a simple question of each name: is this a food, or is this there to fix a problem the processing created? Gums, starches, isolates, and stabilizers clustered in the middle of a list are common signs of reformulation. Ceylon cinnamon, olive oil, and rolled oats are not.

This has always mattered, and it matters even more now because the tools available to food companies for solving a sugar problem with more processing are faster and more scalable than they used to be. An AI system can generate that substitution in minutes. Reading the label, ingredient by ingredient, is still the fastest way for a shopper to catch it.

Why I Have a Point of View on This

When I started Merricks Kitchen, I was not trying to build a slightly better granola. I wanted a breakfast that never depended on processed ingredients in the first place, built around premium, whole-food nutrition, that people would genuinely look forward to eating. The taste had to be exceptional. That part was non-negotiable.

But I also learned early that the product alone was not enough. People needed context. The food industry has spent decades engineering products to hit what scientists call the bliss point, the exact combination of sugar, fat, and salt that keeps people reaching for more. That engineering has reshaped what we crave. Most of us now expect food to taste sweeter than our bodies actually need. Take the sugar out of your diet and your palate retrains itself to crave less of it. It is a recalibration, and for most people it happens faster than they expect once they give it a real chance.

Plenty of technology executives who spent careers optimizing screens for engagement kept phones and tablets away from their own kids. They understood the mechanism well enough to opt their own families out of it. I don't know whether the food scientists formulating ultra-processed ingredients do the same at their own kitchen tables. I'd genuinely like to know.

There is a deeper problem underneath this. When a company solves a sugar cut with a new processed ingredient, it does not reach for whatever is on hand. It develops a proprietary blend, patents it, and licenses it out to other manufacturers, another product to sell, another margin to protect. The industry is not only choosing the cheaper fix. It is building intellectual property around a problem it created, protecting the fix's profit ahead of the health of the person eating it. The starting question should be what is good for the person eating the food, not what can be trademarked and sold to patch what processing broke in the first place.

I am not a food scientist arguing from a lab. I am a food-loving founder who bet the business on the idea that real ingredients, sourced well and combined with care, could beat engineered ones on taste, not just on principle. That bet is what makes the rest of this argument more than a hot take.

Proof, Not Promises

Anyone can publish a mission statement. Here is what backs ours up.

All three Brekky Mix varieties carry Non-UPF Verification from WISEcode, a food data platform that researchers at the National Cancer Institute and USDA rely on for processing and health studies. WISEcode evaluates products ingredient by ingredient across five processing levels, from minimally processed to super-ultra-processed, instead of just totaling fat, sugar, and sodium the way a standard label does. We did not reformulate anything to pass. No ingredient got swapped to earn the badge. The verification confirmed decisions Isabelle and I had already made under our Triple Zero Standard: zero seed oil, zero refined sugar, zero artificial anything.

The recipe behind that verification is not a secret either, and I think that matters more than most brands would admit. If you had the time and the sourcing, you could make something close to Brekky Mix in your own kitchen. We combine whole foods, including extra virgin olive oil in place of seed oils, and bake them lightly. We are not refining, bleaching, deodorizing, or extracting anything, the industrial steps that turn a whole ingredient into something you would not recognize and that make an ingredient ultra-processed in the first place. What we charge for is not a formula under lock and key. It is the sourcing, the ratio work, and the consistency of getting the same result batch after batch.

The whole food ingredients behind Brekky Mix. See how this compares to typical granola.

Where the Industry Is Already Heading

Regulators are starting to ask the question the industry keeps avoiding. Three pressures are converging on the industry at once: resistance from the top, regulation catching up from below, and a market that is already voting with its wallet.

That resistance is not hypothetical. In August 2026, Bloomberg reported that food company executives, including chief executives and trade group representatives, called and wrote to the White House asking it to delay the federal government's first attempt at an official definition of ultra-processed food. The industry's stated concern was litigation risk and cost. The more telling number sits in a BNP Paribas analysis cited alongside that story: at least 77 percent of US retail sales at Kraft Heinz, Mondelez, Conagra, General Mills, and Campbell's comes from ultra-processed products. When more than three-quarters of a company's revenue depends on a category, a clear definition of that category is not paperwork. It is a business risk worth lobbying against. That same math explains the lobbying: a cheap substitute is easier to defend than a category-wide rebuild.

California's AB 1264, the Real Food, Healthy Kids Act, was signed in October 2025. Schools begin phasing out ultra-processed foods of concern in 2029, vendors lose the ability to supply them by 2032, and the ban is fully in effect by 2035. The law goes past nutrient counts to look at processing methods and what each additive is actually there to do. Karsten Smet, CEO of ACI Group, summed up what that means for ingredient suppliers: "Reducing sugar or salt alone won't be enough anymore."

Consumers are already ahead of the regulators. Nearly one in two people globally say they bought more fresh, unprocessed food over the past year. Almost three in four say they have reconsidered or skipped a purchase after reading the ingredient list (Innova Market Insights). The clean label ingredients market was valued at 136.1 billion dollars in 2025 and is projected to reach 207.2 billion dollars by 2035 (Precedence Research).

Put together, the pressure only moves one direction. Manufacturers can change the ingredients, or spend more making the same ingredients sound clean. Only one of those survives the kind of scrutiny WISEcode and the Lancet series are now applying at scale.

A Fair Counterpoint, and Why I Still Disagree

I want to give the other side its due, because it deserves a real answer, not a dismissal. Sarah Gallo, SVP of Product Policy at the Consumer Brands Association, has pushed back hard on ultra-processed food criticism, arguing that classifying foods as unhealthy simply because they are processed "misleads consumers," and that regulation should follow science, not emotional labels.

She has a point worth sitting with. Processing is not automatically harmful. Pasteurization, freezing, and fermentation are all processing, and they make food safer and more available, not worse. Nobody serious about real food should pretend otherwise. The line that actually matters is not processed versus unprocessed. It is whether an ingredient earns its place because it serves the person eating it, or because it serves the manufacturing line, the shelf life, or the cost sheet.

That is the test I apply to everything that goes into Brekky Mix and our future products. Ceylon cinnamon and Madagascar vanilla powder are processed too, in the sense that they are harvested, dried, and ground. Neither one exists to mimic a texture that sugar used to provide, and neither showed up on our label because a system recommended it as a substitute. The Lancet series, the Chile and UK Biobank data, and the Nova classification research all point at the same category of concern: additives chosen to engineer a sensory experience cheaply and at scale, with little regard for what that engineering does to the body over years. Gallo is right that not all processing deserves suspicion. She is wrong if the conclusion is that reformulation gets a pass just because some processing is harmless.

The Real Price Isn't on the Label

Brekky Mix is my answer to that test, built from ingredients chosen because they earn their place, not because they are easy or cheap to source.

None of this is cheap to execute. Extra virgin olive oil, Ceylon cinnamon, Madagascar vanilla powder, organic gluten-free oats, and real nuts and seeds all cost more than their conventional, processed counterparts, and that shows up on a shelf price I am not going to apologize for.

I think that cost is more honest than most food pricing. When a product leans on cheap, ultra-processed fillers to hit a price point, somebody still pays for that choice eventually, just not at the register. Building around whole-food ingredients from day one means the cost is visible now, in the price, instead of buried in someone's health outcomes twenty years down the road.

The real price isn't printed on the label, but the ingredient list still gives it away. None of this requires becoming a food scientist. Read the ingredient list before the front-of-pack claim. Ask what a name is doing there. Count the ingredients you do not recognize, not the ones you do. That habit costs a shopper thirty seconds in a supermarket aisle. It is also the only real defense against a system that can now generate new substitutions faster than any panel can catch them.

That is the bet behind Merricks Kitchen, and I think it is the right one for anyone building in this category right now. The industry can keep building faster ways to patch a formula the research already says does not work. Or it can do the harder, slower work of building with real ingredients from the start. One of those approaches is a patch on a problem the industry created. The other is a foundation. I would rather be early to the second one than efficient at the first.

Sources
Three packages of healthy, Non UPF Verified Brekky Mix granola with product details on a white background