Food industry degrowth as a public health strategy: the case of ultra processed baked goods

Globalization and Health Campbell et al. Globalization and Health (2026) 22:10 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-025-01178-5 Open Access RESEARCH Food industry degrowth as a public health strategy: the case of ultra processed baked goods Norah Campbell1*, Sarah Browne1, Marius Claudy2, Kathryn Reilly3 and Francis M. Finucane4,5,6 Abstract Evidence associates ultra-processed food and beverage (UPF) diets to diverse non-communicable diseases, including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and mental health disorders. Efforts to reformulate by reducing salt, sugar and unhealthy fats in such foods, have not changed the fact that UPFs are an increasing proportion of population diets. The UPF industry is rooted in growth – a fundamental logic at the heart of publicly traded and for-profit private corporations. Our longitudinal analysis of supermarket trade journals from the US and UK spanning 30 years finds that growth in this sector is not demand-led, but industry driven. Our analysis uncovers four dynamics of this growth paradigm, which we call combatition., swotification, the fashion spiral, and demandpumping. Our findings show that, while public health policies result in individual products becoming more ‘healthy’, these benefits are likely to dwarfed by the aggregate (overall) growth of the UPF category itself. We propose a powerful counter paradigm: de-growth. While having gained recognition in ecological economics, we demonstrate its potential for public health, especially its concepts of decoupling and overproduction. While many public health interventions exist within a growth paradigm, a degrowth perspective proposes that the UPF industry cannot innovate its way out of health harms, and that the production of the entire category must decrease. Clinical trial number Not applicable. Introduction Ultra-processing and the food value chain *Correspondence: Norah Campbell 1 Trinity Business School, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland 2 Behavioural Research Lab, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland 3 National Youth Council of Ireland, Dublin, Ireland 4 Centre of Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism, Galway University Hospitals, Galway, Ireland 5 Department of Medicine, University of Galway, Galway, Ireland 6 CÚRAM, University of Galway, Galway, Ireland Foods classified as ultra-processed (UPF) encompass a broad range of ready to eat products including packaged snacks, breakfast cereals, and ready-made meals, and account for more than 50% of dietary intake in some countries, including the US and UK [1]. The world shift towards diets high in UPFs has been recently associated with several adverse health outcomes, including cancer, mental health and cardiovascular disorders, and increased mortality [2]. The ‘ultra’ of food processing has a number of specific characteristics: firstly, when bulk commodities such as maize, wheat, sugarcane and © The Author(s) 2025. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creati vecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Campbell et al. Globalization and Health (2026) 22:10 fat are extracted from their whole sources and chemically modified by processes including industrial heating, use of enzymes, fractionation, and extrusion, resulting in a bulk commodity that has a substantially degraded food matrix. Secondly, the bulk commodity is enhanced to flavor it, or disguise unpleasant flavors, and texturisers to improve sensory mouthfeel such as bulking, gelling or foaming agents. Thirdly, such food is characterized by the removal of ingredients like fiber, water and protein) that usually slow down the absorption of rewarding ingredients (like sugar or fat) into the human body [3–5]. Ultra-processing is a specific activity within what is known as the food value chain. The food value chain comprises the growing, manufacturing, processing, branding, distributing, retailing, consuming and disposing of food [6]. There is a difference between processing (for preservation, safety, and food security) and ultra-processing (for sensory enhancement and repeat consumption, see [7]). Ultra-processing generates the deepest profit pools in the food value chain for at least three reasons. Firstly, the per unit cost of ultra-processing is cheap, because the firm’s aim is to simulate real ingredients, thus keeping raw material costs to a minimum. In other words, producing cheese flavoring is much cheaper than producing cheese. Secondly, UPFs are designed to deliver doses of rewarding ingredients (salt, sugar, fat, flavours and additives) as rapidly as possible, bypassing biological satiety systems. They are thus highly reinforcing to the body, stimulating repeat and increased dose/consumption [8]. Thirdly, UPF producers can command higher mark-up due to business operations not related to nutrition, such as branding, packaging and channel distribution. These activities prime consumers to regard the product as desirable, while also enabling firms to exert structural dominance in food value chains, ultimately crowding out whole or unprocessed food consumption [9, 10]. These three characteristics mean the profit pools in this part of the food value chain are especially attractive, and UPFs have thus been the growth-engine and profit generator for food businesses globally [11, 12]. The UPF industry is dominated by a small number of publicly traded corporations [13]. The primary strategic aim of these organizations is to generate a financial reward in return for investment in the corporation by maximizing profits and/ or earnings per share – in general the primary fiduciary responsibility of Boards of Directors in publicly traded corporations. In search of the causes of causes: the paradigm of growth It is clear that increasing the availability, reducing the price and engineering novel and highly reinforcing foods increases exposure to health-harms globally. Deregulation, privatization, financialization, globalization, corporate power, capitalism and neoliberalism have been variously pin-pointed as the root commercial dynamics Page 2 of (...truncated)