Anatomy of a convenience food
Making sense of nutrition labels, once and for all
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Since nutrition-facts labeling was first introduced by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) in 1973, the back of the box has been a controversial space. Countless FDA rule changes, congressional hearings, and laws have pitted the scientific community and public health advocates against the food companies over how best to convey to the public what actually goes into our foods. Take a look at some packaging today and you can see it’s not going too well — vague health claims mix with unrecognizable, often unpronounceable ingredients to confuse well-intentioned consumers.
The recent frenzy over the ultraprocessed foods that dominate the American diet has sharpened the label debate and raised questions about what is, and what is not, ultraprocessed, and whether all ultraprocessed foods are unhealthy, or if only some of them are, and why. It’s not an insignificant question: Today in the United States, adults consume around 58 percent of their daily calories from ultraprocessed foods, and these foods make up 67 percent of children’s diets.
In an effort to bring some clarity, I set out to decipher the ingredient list of the Nutri-Grain Soft Baked Mixed Berry Bar, the latest iteration of a breakfast bar that has been around in various forms, flavors, and recipes for over 30 years. The package boasts that the bar is made with “8 grams of whole grains,” is a “good source of calcium and iron,” and contains no high-fructose corn syrup. It also lists 38 distinct ingredients — the gums, emulsifiers, anticaking agents, dyes, and starches that are the building blocks of the bar’s novel texture, intense flavor, and unnatural shelf life. Oh, and five different kinds of sugar.
What do all those ingredients do? Should we be worried about them?
Getting answers wasn’t easy. For one, the formulations are closely-held trade secrets. A former food scientist, who worked on the Nutri-Grain bar in the 1980s, told me he was still bound by a non-disclosure agreement. Other experts, meanwhile, can only decipher parts of the equation. A food chemist can walk you through what an ingredient adds structurally to a product; a nutritionist can explain how the human body uses the nutrients provided; a toxicologist can attest to the safety of food-grade chemicals. Virtually no single person can intelligently process the entire label, least of all you.
Nutri-Grain bars are ultraprocessed. But they also are a scientific marvel, the OG of the soft breakfast bars that have been a staple of American mornings for decades. Initially called Smart Start, they hit shelves in 1987, and joined the growing ranks of grab-and-eat products like Quaker Chewy Granola Bars, SlimFast Bars, PowerBars, and more. These bars satisfied Americans’ insatiable demand for food that is cheap, convenient, and able to remain fresh in the pantry for months. There is no food in nature that checks all those boxes. A banana, in its neat natural packaging, comes closest, minus the shelf-stable part.
In the years before these new bars entered the market, the snack aisle was smaller and more homogeneous than today’s kaleidoscopic snack tsunami. When it came to snack bars, most were rock-hard combinations of granola, nuts, seeds, and dried fruit held together with sugar syrup. A soft, two-layer breakfast bar was a creative challenge because it needed to deliver two distinct textures: a bendy crust and a flavor-packed, fruity filling.
In the 1980s, Kellogg’s set out to crack the code. The company (now rebranded Kellanova) was already making Pop-Tarts, but wanted a more nutritious bar, using whole grains in the crust and real fruit inside.
The trick, it turned out, was balancing so-called water activity, explains Dr. Karen Schaich, an associate professor of lipid chemistry at Rutgers University. Water activity was a new, hot concept back in the day. If you remember high school biology, this is, essentially, managing osmosis. Food engineers had to prevent the water that is part of the filling from seeping into the crust and vice versa, as it would result in a mushy bar. And many of the Nutri-Grain bar’s 38 ingredients are there to create this artificial structure.
The sheer number of industrial ingredients required to crack the code is problematic, said Thomas Galligan, the principal scientist for food additives and supplements at the Center for Science in the Public Interest: “Even for me, an expert in food chemical safety who knows where to look for information, understanding what was in this food was a time-consuming task,” he said. “Expecting consumers to do this themselves is entirely unreasonable.”
On the whole, though, it’s a decent effort at giving Americans everything they want: a cheap, pantry-stable breakfast with some nutritional value and a relatively reasonable amount of sugar. “You wouldn’t want to eat nothing but breakfast bars,” said Schaich. “But you can look at the nutrition label and balance how much sugar you get. It is fortified. It does have nutrition with it.”
She’s got a point. Unless, that is, you compare it to a banana, which is cheaper, convenient, and delivers a similar amount of calories, fiber, and protein — with no added sugar.
Anatomy of a breakfast bar
Keep scrolling to learn what these ingredients really mean – for taste and nutrition.
Nutri-Grain bars have 8 grams of whole grains — half of a daily serving — most of which likely come from the oats and whole wheat flour. (Enriched flour is stripped of its fiber and micronutrients, but then has B vitamins and iron added back in, along with folic acid.)
Sugar molecules have groups of atoms that bind water, blocking water molecules’ movement and reducing their reactivity. The Nutri-Grain crust uses multiple types of sugar to control water, and to provide additional functions. Table sugar provides bulk to the crust. Dextrose (from corn and wheat starch), fructose (from cornstarch and fruits), and invert sugar (sugar treated with acid or enzymes) prevent crystallization of the table sugar during storage. And in the filling, corn syrup provides body and, together with invert sugar, inhibits crystallization. A lot of sugar goes into that textural stability.
But sugar only gets us so far. More powerful binders are needed to prevent a soggy breakfast bar. Sodium alginate, a gum, forms strong, charged bonds with dicalcium phosphate to create a mesh network of molecules. Modified food starch gelatinizes within this network, and methylcellulose (a thickener and emulsifier) fills in remaining spaces. The result is a filling that is gel-like but not runny.
Nutri-Grain’s crust uses oats, wheat flours, and oils to form its main structure, just like a homemade cookie. But unlike a homemade cookie, the bar bends rather than crumbles. This “cohesion” is achieved by adding small amounts of whey protein, corn fiber, cellulose, carrageenan, and guar gum. These are polymers that bind water, stretch, and create interlocking matrices within the dough to increase its strength and keep it from crumbling.
The use of so many types of sugar obscures how much sugar is in each bar. Every one of these 11 ingredients is essentially glucose or fructose, but splitting up the sweetness this way allows the manufacturer to avoid listing sugar as the first or second ingredient.
Carrageenan has been used for decades to add viscosity to dairy products and bind proteins in deli meats. In recent years, some food companies have abandoned carrageenan due to concerns that it can cause gastrointestinal inflammation, and high levels (much more than what is found in food products) have been associated with colon cancer.
“Natural flavors” are a black box — there could be one or dozens of ingredients represented by these two little words, as long as, per the FDA, they are derived from a natural substance. (“Artificial flavors” and “spices” are similarly opaque categories.) Food safety advocates worry that unknown compounds and chemicals might be hiding in these vague descriptions due to the obscure FDA designation “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, loophole which allows companies to self-certify that ingredients are safe and bypass the FDA’s approval process. Of course, since they’re not listed individually, it’s hard to know what they might be. But there are several dozen ingredients — peach, poppy seed, sunflower oil — that are known to cause allergic reactions that would be permitted by the FDA under the term “natural flavors.” In a 2024 report, the Center for Science in the Public Interest stated: “By not requiring labeling for other known food allergens while simultaneously allowing the use of the vague ingredient terms ‘spices’ and ‘natural flavors,’ the FDA allows the food industry to hide known allergens from consumers who need that information to protect themselves.”
Glycerides are emulsifiers; they bring together substances that will not normally blend on their own — think oil and water. In the Nutri-Grain crust, glycerides essentially perform the function that eggs play in a homemade cake or cookie. Vegetarians and vegans may want to pay heed as they are sometimes derived from animal fat — though there’s no way to tell by reading the label. Soy lecithin is another common emulsifier, and is widely considered safe.
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