Clean ingredients that sound natural - and why that suddenly matters again

For years, the food industry has treated “clean label” as a marketing problem.

• Remove an E-number.

• Use "store cupboard ingredients"

• Reduce the length of ingredient declarations on back of pack.

What’s changed recently is not the existence of processed food - it’s the level of public scrutiny around how food is processed, why, and whether the trade-offs are still justified. The debate has re-entered the mainstream.

From Joe Wicks: Food for Fitness to the success of Chris van Tulleken’s “Ultra-Processed People”, consumers are being exposed - often for the first time - to the idea that not all processing is equal, and that formulation decisions made far upstream can shape health, trust, and perception downstream.

For food producers, this creates a familiar tension.

• The system still needs processed food.

• Scale still requires consistency, safety, and shelf life.

• Cost pressure has not gone away.

But the tolerance for ingredients that sound synthetic, opaque, or unnecessary is narrowing. And that matters — not because of ideology, but because perception now influences risk.

The quiet return of ingredient scrutiny

What’s striking about the current moment is how little it resembles previous “clean eating” cycles. This is not about superfoods or exclusion diets.

It is about processing logic.

Both the documentary and the book focus less on individual nutrients, and more on the architecture of modern food: fractionation, recombination, texture engineering, and the substitution of whole-food function with isolated additives.

That framing resonates because it aligns with something food manufacturers already know internally: Many formulation decisions were made to solve industrial constraints - not nutritional ones.

Those decisions made sense at the time. But some of their side-effects are now visible to consumers in a way they weren’t before.

Why “natural-sounding” ingredients are not about optics

There’s a temptation to treat this moment as a communications challenge.

Change the language.

Control the narrative.

Re-educate the consumer.

That approach misses the point.

What consumers are responding to is not branding — it’s credibility. Ingredients that sound natural tend to share three characteristics:

They originate from recognisable crops or processes

• They perform multiple functions, rather than replacing each one with a separate additive

• They can be explained without a chemistry lesson

This is not nostalgia. It’s cognitive load. When ingredient lists become shorter and more intuitive, trust increases - even if the product remains processed.

Processing is not the enemy - fragmentation is

One of the most unhelpful conclusions drawn from the “ultra-processed” debate is that processing itself is the problem. It isn’t.

Processing is what allows food to be safe, affordable, and widely available.

The issue is how fragmented processing has become.

Over time, many foods have been deconstructed into ever more specialised inputs -stabilisers, emulsifiers, texturisers, isolates - each solving a narrow technical problem, often sourced from different global supply chains. The result is food that works industrially, but looks and feels increasingly abstract to the people eating it.

Reversing that trend does not require abandoning processing. It requires re-integrating function.

When one ingredient can do the work of many

From a formulation perspective, the most powerful ingredients today are not the most novel. They are the ones that:

• deliver protein, fibre, and functionality together

• replace multiple additives with a single crop-derived input

• integrate into existing processes without re-engineering lines

• arrive with procurement-grade traceability and allergen clarity

This is where “clean” stops being about purity and starts being about efficiency - fewer ingredients, fewer suppliers, fewer explanations.

For manufacturers under pressure to reduce cost, risk, and Scope 3 emissions simultaneously, this matters more than philosophy.

Clean labels as a by-product of better system design

The most scalable changes in food rarely happen because consumers demand them explicitly. They happen because producers redesign systems in ways that quietly remove friction.

When ingredients are:

• derived from familiar crops

• processed through transparent, auditable systems

• supplied regionally rather than globally

• used to replace several additives at once

the label improves as a side-effect.

Not because anyone set out to chase a claim — but because the system became simpler.

That distinction is important.

Why this matters now - commercially, not culturally

The current focus on ultra-processing will not last forever. But its effects on risk perception, retailer scrutiny, and regulatory attention already matter. For food producers, the question is not whether to respond – it is how.

High-friction reformulation in response to public pressure often creates more problems than it solves.

Low-friction reformulation - using ingredients that behave like food, sound like food, and come from food - creates optionality.

It allows producers to:

• simplify labels without compromising performance

• reduce additive dependency without redesigning factories

• respond to current media pressure without chasing trends

• future-proof portfolios against shifting definitions of “acceptable” processing

That is not a consumer strategy. It is a resilience strategy.

Closing thought: familiarity scales faster than novelty

The food system does not need to swing from hyper-processed to idealised whole foods. It needs better integration between agriculture, processing, and formulation - so that ingredients once again look and feel like they belong in food.

In a world where scrutiny is rising but tolerance for disruption is low, the safest path forward is not to fight processing - but to make it quieter, simpler, and easier to explain.

Clean ingredients that sound natural are not about going backwards. They are about rebuilding trust - one formulation decision at a time.

Read more here.

For years, the food industry has treated “clean label” as a marketing problem.

• Remove an E-number.

• Use "store cupboard ingredients"

• Reduce the length of ingredient declarations on back of pack.

What’s changed recently is not the existence of processed food - it’s the level of public scrutiny around how food is processed, why, and whether the trade-offs are still justified. The debate has re-entered the mainstream.

From Joe Wicks: Food for Fitness to the success of Chris van Tulleken’s “Ultra-Processed People”, consumers are being exposed - often for the first time - to the idea that not all processing is equal, and that formulation decisions made far upstream can shape health, trust, and perception downstream.

For food producers, this creates a familiar tension.

• The system still needs processed food.

• Scale still requires consistency, safety, and shelf life.

• Cost pressure has not gone away.

But the tolerance for ingredients that sound synthetic, opaque, or unnecessary is narrowing. And that matters — not because of ideology, but because perception now influences risk.

The quiet return of ingredient scrutiny

What’s striking about the current moment is how little it resembles previous “clean eating” cycles. This is not about superfoods or exclusion diets.

It is about processing logic.

Both the documentary and the book focus less on individual nutrients, and more on the architecture of modern food: fractionation, recombination, texture engineering, and the substitution of whole-food function with isolated additives.

That framing resonates because it aligns with something food manufacturers already know internally: Many formulation decisions were made to solve industrial constraints - not nutritional ones.

Those decisions made sense at the time. But some of their side-effects are now visible to consumers in a way they weren’t before.

Why “natural-sounding” ingredients are not about optics

There’s a temptation to treat this moment as a communications challenge.

Change the language.

Control the narrative.

Re-educate the consumer.

That approach misses the point.

What consumers are responding to is not branding — it’s credibility. Ingredients that sound natural tend to share three characteristics:

They originate from recognisable crops or processes

• They perform multiple functions, rather than replacing each one with a separate additive

• They can be explained without a chemistry lesson

This is not nostalgia. It’s cognitive load. When ingredient lists become shorter and more intuitive, trust increases - even if the product remains processed.

Processing is not the enemy - fragmentation is

One of the most unhelpful conclusions drawn from the “ultra-processed” debate is that processing itself is the problem. It isn’t.

Processing is what allows food to be safe, affordable, and widely available.

The issue is how fragmented processing has become.

Over time, many foods have been deconstructed into ever more specialised inputs -stabilisers, emulsifiers, texturisers, isolates - each solving a narrow technical problem, often sourced from different global supply chains. The result is food that works industrially, but looks and feels increasingly abstract to the people eating it.

Reversing that trend does not require abandoning processing. It requires re-integrating function.

When one ingredient can do the work of many

From a formulation perspective, the most powerful ingredients today are not the most novel. They are the ones that:

• deliver protein, fibre, and functionality together

• replace multiple additives with a single crop-derived input

• integrate into existing processes without re-engineering lines

• arrive with procurement-grade traceability and allergen clarity

This is where “clean” stops being about purity and starts being about efficiency - fewer ingredients, fewer suppliers, fewer explanations.

For manufacturers under pressure to reduce cost, risk, and Scope 3 emissions simultaneously, this matters more than philosophy.

Clean labels as a by-product of better system design

The most scalable changes in food rarely happen because consumers demand them explicitly. They happen because producers redesign systems in ways that quietly remove friction.

When ingredients are:

• derived from familiar crops

• processed through transparent, auditable systems

• supplied regionally rather than globally

• used to replace several additives at once

the label improves as a side-effect.

Not because anyone set out to chase a claim — but because the system became simpler.

That distinction is important.

Why this matters now - commercially, not culturally

The current focus on ultra-processing will not last forever. But its effects on risk perception, retailer scrutiny, and regulatory attention already matter. For food producers, the question is not whether to respond – it is how.

High-friction reformulation in response to public pressure often creates more problems than it solves.

Low-friction reformulation - using ingredients that behave like food, sound like food, and come from food - creates optionality.

It allows producers to:

• simplify labels without compromising performance

• reduce additive dependency without redesigning factories

• respond to current media pressure without chasing trends

• future-proof portfolios against shifting definitions of “acceptable” processing

That is not a consumer strategy. It is a resilience strategy.

Closing thought: familiarity scales faster than novelty

The food system does not need to swing from hyper-processed to idealised whole foods. It needs better integration between agriculture, processing, and formulation - so that ingredients once again look and feel like they belong in food.

In a world where scrutiny is rising but tolerance for disruption is low, the safest path forward is not to fight processing - but to make it quieter, simpler, and easier to explain.

Clean ingredients that sound natural are not about going backwards. They are about rebuilding trust - one formulation decision at a time.

Read more here.