Ultra-Processed Foods: Consumer perspectives and innovative solutions

Last Updated : 19 February 2025

Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are a pressing issue in public discourse—from health concerns to policy discussions—but what do EU consumers really think? On January 31, 2025, we hosted a dynamic webinar to explore how consumers deal with the UPFs classification, bringing together 9 top experts and over 500 attendees. This engaging session explored scientific perspectives related to UPFs consumer understanding and expectations, as well as the challenges and innovative solutions in today’s food production system.

CONTEXT: 10 YEARS OF UPF TRENDS IN SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

The topic of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) has gathered significant scientific and political attention for 10+ years, ever so often expressed through alarmist health messages in the media and the growing popular call to ban (or at least tax) them, out of precaution right now in the EU.

Don’t get us wrong. There’s no denying basic epidemiology:

• Indeed, a huge proportion of UPFs, especially in certain food categories (drinks, sweets, processed meats, bakeries, etc.), are also foods with a quite bad nutritional profile.
• As well, the average profiles of high UPF consumers (lower socioeconomical status, lower degree of education, lower physical activity levels, fewer time spent cooking etc.) play a substantial role in the association of high UPF consumption with adverse health outcomes.

But to act on UPFs at a population scale, you need more than statistical correlations, especially when most of those correlations can already be explained by nutritional quality of diets and overall lifestyle factors. To be able to pin UPFs and only UPFs, you need to understand the underlying mechanisms. You need explicative models (biological, mainly) to confirm epidemiology. That’s where it becomes tricky: indeed, the scientific questions surrounding the specific impacts of UPFs (versus minimally processed foods, MPFs) rely on so many levels:

• The ingredient level, of course, through the specific health impacts (including interactions with microbiota) of high consumption of food additives, food contaminants (pollutants, process-related, packaging, etc.), etc. but as well through the matrix effect (due to the cracking of native ingredients and the loss of beneficial compounds), etc.
• The food level, through the better, more robust, more reliable classification of different foods in Processing Level Categories, so we can keep on running ever more solid epidemiological analyses.
• The diet level, since certain UPFs like wholemeal bread or vegetable-based sauces, are proved to be part of a healthy diet. Also, lots of interventional research is currently going on to compare ad libitum diets differing only in their level of processing. There are already results linked with satiety triggers, with chewing mechanisms, with higher palatability (textures, tastes, even marketing support), as more and more will come. Of note, EUFIC is involved in the Restructure project, which is running a randomized controlled trial that aims to understand how the texture of ultra-processed foods may influence food intake, energy consumption, metabolic functions, and changes in body weight. Stay tuned for the results that are coming in 2025!
• The food system level itself, through assessing the overall costs of avoiding UPFs (or developing tax schemes on UPFs) on individuals, especially for consumers in underprivileged communities, whether it means actual money, time expenditure, or health-related factors. At the population level, it could also mean energy/carbon expenditure, impact of agriculture, storage, transformation, transportation (overall food systems) on natural resources, on social conditions, etc. It can even have implications on food and culinary education in kids, food literacy, food risk perception, as well as food hygiene and microbiological risks, etc.

In any case, the whole UPF topic deserves a much more complex treatment than what has been the case recently. This webinar was designed to address some of those questions and what they mean to consumers in the EU, in an open, balanced, science-driven way.

THE AUDIENCE: A WIDE DIVERSITY OF FOOD LOVERS INTERESTED IN THIS DEBATE

1041 people from all over the world registered to this event.

All the sectors in the food landscape were represented, with most of them coming from Food industry (38%), Academia (27%) or Healthcare (15%) sectors.

Of course, most of them are used to eating UPFs on a daily basis.

We also ran some basic UPF perception questions to the attendees, here are the results: In general, attendees:

• Think that EU kids today vastly prefer artificial tastes over original/natural ones, especially considering sweet foods.
• Think that EU consumers vastly associate ultra-processed foods with unbalanced nutritional intakes
• Mainly consider that a mandatory, front-of-pack labelling system, ranking the degree of processing of foods (or ingredients) would not be useful for EU public health
• Vastly consider that ultra processing is not a significant obstacle for them to integrate more plant-based foods in their diets.
• Do not feel more guilty feeding their loved ones UPFs than eating UPFs themselves.
• Don’t trust all food communication actors to the same extent on this topic (see below, from no trust at all (0) to complete trust (7))

So, overall, an already quite food-science literate crowd, that relies on authorities and science on the topic of UPF and consequently apply rational thinking to their own daily intakes and perceptions of UPFs, while being concerned by the fact that the vast majority of consumers are both afraid and against food processing as a whole.

HIGH QUALITY SPEAKERS ADDRESSED CRITICAL TOPICS

Below are summaries of each presentation:

How do ultra-processed foods impact kids' eating behaviours?

Joyce Haddad, Researcher at Berner Fachhochschule (BFH, Switzerland), talked about ways to improve children’s food literacy and dietary behaviors. She showed that the home environment, including parental practices, was critical in this matter and deserved to be at the center of public health interventions. She then presented 2 current projects of hers: UMAMI sensory education program to enhance nutritional knowledge in primary schools, and the BeeHealthy app, empowering teenagers to make healthier choices through gamification.

Lucile Marty, Researcher atINRAE (CSGA, France), talked about cognitive psychology applied to food behaviors in children. She discussed the sensory, psychosocial and interpersonal dimensions of pleasure in eating, and the critical influence of eating context in strategies to make unprocessed foods desirable for kids.

What do EU consumers understand and expect from food processing?

Klaus Grunert, Professor of Marketing at Aarhus University (Denmark), and Director of the EIT Food Consumer Observatory, presented EIT Food’s most recent survey on UPF perception in the EU, based on 10,000 consumers from 17 EU countries alongside a follow-up qualitative study. They notably found that the majority (65%) of EU consumers believe that ultra-processed foods are unhealthy, and that they will cause health issues later in life.

Will public health ever be addressed through a consumer-oriented tool?

Isabelle Souchon, Research Director at INRAE (SQPOV, France), talked about how food scientists and food process engineers are currently contributing to better understanding the concept of UPFs. She analysed various existing processing degree classification systems and proposed a methodology to better characterize processing levels: the Process Score, that already shows to be more discriminating than NOVA. She then discussed some major difficulties that need to be addressed for a clearer, more relevant debate for public health.

Susanne Bügel, Professor at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), talked about her current, starting project of upgrading the NOVA classification system: the UPDATE project. She acknowledged the need to overcome epidemiological gaps and issues with current NOVA classification and presented her plan to involve experts in workshops to progressively gain knowledge and develop an updated scheme.

How does the UPF prism already impact EU's ways of producing and distributing food?

Sergio Román Nicolás, Professor of Marketing at the University of Murcia (Spain), talked about his collaboration with Dr Luisma Sanches (Hero Group), Prof Dr Michael Siegrist (ETH Zurich) and the many works they have published on naturalness perception in food consumers, its links with perceived healthiness, and how to measure it. He then discussed current challenges (including shelf-life) faced by food industries to develop minimally processed foods that are both nutritionally adequate and accessible.

Barthelemy Peuchot, Co-founder of Nudj (France) presented how he and his brother developed a food company that offers minimally processed, plant (jackfruit)-based meat alternatives, the challenges as well as the upsides they encounter in developing both the brand identity and the production schemes.

How can we avoid demonizing UPFs in underprivileged populations?

Adam Drewnowski(recorded), Director of the Center for Public Health Nutrition at the University of Washington (USA), discussed the implications of UPFs being cheaper, more convenient, thus more easily adopted by underprivileged communities, especially considering there that women are the only ones spending time cooking from raw foods, and that, overall, time spent eating (lunch, dinner) is still getting shorter over time in developed countries.

Clelia Bianchi, Founder and Program Coordinator at Alim'Mater - Non-Profit Organisation (France), describes how her association addresses the UPF topic with underprivileged families through workshops with recent mothers, refraining from blaming families or from shaming UPFs and eating pleasure as such, and providing adapted solutions to daily feeding/eating issues, in all humbleness.