Potato Chips, Artificials, and MAHA: Politics Indeed Creates Strange Bedfellows!
I recently read in the news that Lays was removing all of their artificial colors and flavors by end of 2025. Having worked at PepsiCo and other CPG companies for most of my career, this was an interesting development and welcome surprise. However, I'm probably not the first to say "there are artificial colors and flavors in potato chips??"
How did we get here and what does the future look like for CPG food manufacturers?
Much of our food supply we have taken for granted in 2025. Many of us have learned that there are two main sections of the store - 1) the Perimeter: where fresh vegetables, dairy, and bakery live and 2) the center - aisles filled with pre-packaged, canned, bottled, or frozen items. Countless health and wellness thought leaders have given the advice to shop the perimeter and skip the center to avoid artificials, preservatives, and ultra processed foods. Indeed some estimates put the American diet composed of 70-80% ultra processed foods. We're still coming to terms with the long term health impacts of ultra processed foods, but the journey of how we got here remains long.
Early last century, food safety wasn't a throwaway issue. As detailed in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle unsanitary meatpacking practices were dangerous and created an outcry which laid the foundation for the Food and Drug Administration, as well as pasteurization and canning. However it was WWII that really accelerated advances in food preservation - freezing technologies, dehydration, irradiation, and vacuum-packing for shelf stable foods. For the time this was a breakthrough - food could be preserved much longer and it set the stage for massive CPG food companies to operate.
Once large CPG companies started to industrialize food production, corporations did what they do best - find ways to extract cost out of the process via processing ingredient. Ingredient were processed to make them more uniform and predictable for manufacturing. Real flavors were variable in consistency so they were swapped out for the predictable, processed ones.
While working in innovation at PepsiCo I saw this first-hand. I was paired up with a talented entrepreneur to create an all natural, organic Overnight Oats product. This entrepreneur had a recipe that he had developed in his kitchen combining organic dried fruits and spices to create some really delicious breakfast options - just add milk! The challenge came when we tried to recreate the recipes for scaled manufacturing within the PepsiCo system. PepsiCo had optimized it ingredients and suppliers over decades - carefully selecting suppliers based on the consistency of their products and how well it worked within the PepsiCo system. And it worked just great…for what they were already producing. However for this new Overnight Oats product, the ingredients were not in the PepsiCo system. Where the recipe called for organic cherries, the supplier network only had non-organic cherries that were coated in dextrose (a sugar) for easier processing. Using that ingredient would not work for us, but when we tried to get a new supplier approved who actually sold the ingredient we were looking for, the PepsiCo vetting process for a new ingredient would take about 12 months.
The problem was that starting in the 1970s with the establishment of the organic food movement to early 2000s, consumers became much more savvy about where their food came from and started to prioritize Organic and local farming, GMO free, and eventually farm-to-fork traceability. Consumers wanted MORE information about where their food came from, how it was grown, and how it was processed. In recent years, that trend has continued with the emerging awareness of the health issues of ultraprocessed foods. As a result CPG food manufacturers have found themselves heavily invested in ingredient sourcing and processing that is becoming more and more irrelevant from a consumer standpoint. Their solution in the face of these trends has been to make token changes - maybe have an organic variety of cookie (which is more expensive) alongside the standard variety (which is less expensive). Meanwhile their loyal consumer base starts to erode and shrink. The corporation feels like it has done its best to address consumer trends while maintaining the status quo and their profits. Never has consumer health and wellness entered the conversation.
So here's where it gets a bit weird. Now the MAHA movement spearheaded by Robert Kennedy Jr. has put artificials, sugar, and ultraprocessing in the crosshairs of the US government. Suddenly we're seeing companies independently getting ahead of any future regulation by "cleaning up" their ingredient lists and moving away from processing. As a Health and Wellness enthusiast, I'm really torn. I love the focus on cleaning up ingredient lists - it really puts CPG companies more in step with consumer preferences and inches the US toward a healthier food system. On the other hand there are a number of additional policies that the MAHA team is pursuing which (in my opinion) do not further our country's health and wellness
So for the moment, I love seeing the headlines of large food companies making well-needed changes to de-industrialize the food we eat on a daily basis - even if it means that we have an increase of suspect advice around things like vaccines, Tylenol, etc.
What do you think? Is the improvement in our food system worth the increase of conspiracy theories? Let me know your thoughts!!
-Bryant
Here's the original article about the changes to Lay's
