By Michael J. Critelli | MakeUsWell Newsletter, 

Consumer packaged-goods companies often defend themselves with a familiar argument: they are simply giving consumers what consumers want. People want food that is convenient, inexpensive, tasty and shelf-stable, so companies supply it.

That explanation is incomplete.

Companies do not merely respond to demand. They shape it. They decide which products to develop, how intensely to test them, which sensory combinations to optimize, how to package them, how to market them, and which behaviors they want consumers to repeat. 

In the case of ultra-processed foods, the decision by tobacco companies to acquire and operate major food businesses as a diversification strategy introduced ingredients or techniques for increasing food demand that independently owned food companies would not have developed and used.

Tobacco companies did not invent processed or ultra-processed food. Industrial bread, candy, breakfast cereal, frozen meals and soft drinks existed long before Philip Morris acquired General Foods and Kraft or R.J. Reynolds acquired Nabisco. Nor should every ultra-processed food be described as addictive.

But tobacco companies brought something unusually powerful to food: decades of experience designing products around reinforcement, repeated use and consumer loyalty.

A 2024 study in the journal Addiction examined food products sold when major U.S. food companies were tobacco-owned. Foods owned by tobacco companies were 29% more likely than non-tobacco-owned foods to meet a definition of hyper-palatability based on fat and sodium, and 80% more likely to qualify based on carbohydrates and sodium. By 2018, these kinds of formulations had become widespread throughout the food system, even among companies no longer connected to tobacco.

Even more revealing evidence appeared in 2026. Researchers examining previously undisclosed Philip Morris documents reconstructed the development of Lunchables at Kraft General Foods. They concluded that Philip Morris intentionally shared research and development capabilities across tobacco and food businesses. Its “consumer-driven product development” process sought to optimize products for pleasure and appeal. 

The researchers also found that Philip Morris transferred a “better-for-you” strategy from cigarettes to food: just as filtered or lower-tar cigarettes could retain health-conscious smokers, Low-Fat Lunchables could help retain consumers worried about obesity without losing them to another product.

That is very different from passively discovering what customers want.

The more accurate model is a feedback loop. Consumers naturally prefer sweetness, saltiness, fat, convenience and pleasing textures. Food companies observe those preferences. But sophisticated product developers can then amplify them by testing combinations, refining textures, adjusting eating speed, optimizing aroma and mouthfeel, and designing portion and packaging formats that encourage frequent consumption. Marketing and distribution then make those products highly visible and easy to obtain. What appears afterward as “consumer demand” partly reflects demand that the product itself has helped intensify.

This does not require us to claim that sugar, fat or ultra-processed foods are identical to nicotine. The science of “food addiction” is still debated, and the category of ultra-processed foods is too broad to assume that every item has addictive potential. 

But evidence increasingly supports the proposition that some highly processed foods can generate addiction-like patterns of craving, reinforcement, loss of control and continued consumption despite negative consequences. Researchers have explicitly evaluated highly processed foods against criteria originally used for tobacco addiction and argued that some meet those standards.

We also know that formulation changes behavior. In a tightly controlled NIH randomized trial, participants provided with an ultra-processed diet consumed about 500 more calories per day than when they ate a minimally processed diet, even though the offered diets were matched for calories, sugar, fat, carbohydrates and fiber. They ate faster and gained weight on the ultra-processed diet.

So the critical question for consumers is not simply, “Is this food processed?”

It is: “What was this food engineered to make me do?”

Processing can make food safer, cheaper, more nutritious, easier to transport and more convenient. Those are genuine benefits. But engineering a food so that a person wants another bite before the body’s normal satiety signals have had time to intervene, usually a 15-20 minute time interval,  is a fundamentally different objective.

That may be the tobacco industry’s most important legacy in food. It was not merely a collection of recipes or ingredients. It was a way of thinking: identify the biological and psychological mechanisms that drive repeated consumption, optimize the product around them, and then describe the resulting behavior as consumer choice.

Consumers undoubtedly have preferences. But when companies possess enormous scientific, behavioral, marketing and technological capabilities, “we are only giving people what they want” becomes much too convenient an explanation.

The more relevant question is “Who caused them to want more?”