Beyond the Label: Rethinking How We Define Ultraprocessed Foods

Managing Perceptions Around "Ultraprocessed" Foods

In my years of watching how a single phrase on a package can steer a shopper's hand before the ingredients list ever gets a glance, I've come to see "ultraprocessed" as one of the most quietly powerful words on the shelf. As Nutritional Outlook turns its attention to how the diet and nutrition world is managing perceptions around the term, the framing matters as much as the formulation — and readers who care about labels are right to pay attention. The conversation is moving past calorie-counting and into questions of culture, craft, and the trust we place in what we eat.

A practical reframing for the shelf

"Ultraprocessed" has become shorthand for a constellation of concerns: industrial additives, stripped fiber, hidden sugars, the quiet erosion of the kitchen table. The label pulls together texture, shelf life, and cost into one uneasy verdict, and readers are right to ask whether it oversimplifies. I've found it more useful to treat the word as a perception tool rather than a verdict on a single nutrient. Two products can carry identical macros and feel utterly different in the body — one a quick surge, the other a slow, steady burn. The category invites that distinction rather than foreclosing it.

Tools reshaping the conversation

The clearest signal of where the field is heading came from the Institute of Food Technologists' IFT FIRST annual meeting, where researchers from the Food Intelligence Lab presented an artificial-intelligence benchmark built from more than 21,000 sensory evaluations of 215 plant-based products across 24 categories. According to the team's account, the model draws on ingredients, nutrition, product images, and chemical compounds to estimate how a candidate formulation might rank before it ever reaches a human sensory panel.

The work responds to a stubborn gap. Food Frontier's 2024 Consumer Study, cited at the meeting, found that 46% of former plant-based meat buyers pointed to poor taste as the reason they would not buy again. In separate testing of more than 5,000 omnivores through Nectar, 30% rated plant-based meat products as "like" or "like very much," compared with 68% for animal-product benchmarks. For plant-based dairy, the figures were 35% versus 65%.

Across the benchmark categories, the top-ranked product in human sensory testing was also the model's top pick 33% of the time, and appeared in its top three in 67% of categories — better than the roughly 36% chance a random three-product shortlist would have included the sensory winner. The goal, the team noted, is to send fewer, stronger candidates into expensive panel testing, not to replace the panels themselves. A second project with Proxy Foods explored whether algorithms could shorten the iteration loop on target sensory traits — creaminess, tanginess, consistency, uniformity — in a plant-based yogurt case study.

What to watch and what to do

Two threads are worth keeping on your radar: a broader effort to manage how "ultraprocessed" is communicated, and quieter advances like the sensory-prediction tools that may eventually reshape the plant-based aisle. For now, three small habits travel well.

• Read the label, then read the room. Macros tell one story; ingredient order and fiber content tell another.
• Treat "ultraprocessed" as a question, not a verdict. Ask what was added, what was removed, and how the food makes you feel two hours later.
• When a product disappoints, note whether taste or texture drove the reaction — that detail is exactly what the new sensory tools are being built to predict.