The Food Industry Keeps Solving the Wrong Sugar Problem

August 12, 2026

By Sarah Tobin

Last updated: August 15, 2026
Reading time: 12 min

The fix for less sugar? More processing.

This summer, a major ingredient supplier launched an AI tool that fixes sugar reduction by recommending new processed ingredients to replace what's cut. I think this is the wrong fix, and this piece shows why, using the research and Merricks Kitchen as proof.

Brekky Mix Low Sugar Granola

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. The tool exists to solve one problem: when a food company cuts sugar, the product falls apart. Drinks turn thin. Baked goods lose their chew. Protein-fortified foods turn gritty or chalky. The system feeds formulation questions into an AI built on the company's own research, and it recommends which additive to add back in to replace the texture sugar used to provide. Elsewhere in Ingredion's own coverage of the launch, 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 a food formulated with too many processed ingredients… is more processed ingredients, recommended by AI instead of scientists, dietitians, or doctors.

I have spent years building Merricks Kitchen on the opposite premise, and I will use it as a case study throughout this piece, not because it is the point, but 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. Something else, plausibly riskier, went in.

A faster tool for making that swap does not change the swap. It just makes more of it, quicker.

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."

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.

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 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.

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.

Customers notice the difference without needing any of this explained to them first. One reviewer, a longtime Purely Elizabeth Original buyer, put it this way: "I've been a loyal Purely Elizabeth Original fan for years, but Brekky has genuinely won me over. The taste is incredible, warm, hearty, and satisfying without that overly sweet aftertaste I got used to. Once I looked closer, I realized why: Brekky uses clean, natural ingredients I can actually recognize, and the sugar content is noticeably lower than my old go-to. It's rare to find a swap that improves both flavor and nutrition at the same time." — Verified Buyer. Another reviewer, newly retired and researching his diet for brain health, put it simply: "Brekky Mix aligns with the whole grains and nuts components of the MIND diet, and delivers less sugar, more fiber, better oil, and more protein. I look forward to breakfast more than any other meal now." — George, Brekky Mix Original.

The Texture Question Deserves a Real Answer, Not an Algorithm

If a food scientist at a company like Ingredion asked what I would want them to rethink, I would start with a question of my own. What do you eat at home? Are you feeding your own family the ingredients you spend your career formulating into other people's food?

I know most food scientists don't set out to do harm. But I think they work within a system built to protect margin first and health second, and a faster substitution tool keeps that system running exactly as it was designed to run, and the profits flowing, regardless of health outcomes.

So here is the case I would actually make to them. Our palates have been trained to expect a certain sweetness, and that training can be undone. Our palates have also been trained to expect a certain texture and mouthfeel from processed food, and that training can be undone too. Humans adapt. It is one of the things we are best at. When texture changes because a processed ingredient was taken out rather than swapped for another one, that is not automatically a defect to engineer around. It can be explained. People can adjust to it the same way they adjust to needing less sugar, if someone bothers to tell them why it matters, especially for what we feed our kids.

Where the Industry Is Already Heading

Regulators are starting to ask the question the industry keeps avoiding. 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).

Manufacturers, and the investors backing them, have two ways to respond to that shift. Change the ingredients, or get better at making the same ingredients sound clean. Both are already happening, and only one of them holds up under 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 Position I Am Willing to Bet On

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.

That is the bet behind Merricks Kitchen, and I think it is the right one for anyone building in this category right now. See how Brekky Mix compares against the rest of the category in our full product analysis. The industry can keep building AI tools to make faster substitutions inside a formula that the Lancet series, the Chile and UK Biobank data, and its own scientists' quotes already say 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