Thirteen golden rules for profitable processed food

The big food corporations are not interested in selling you healthy and nourishing food. Rather, they want ever-increasing profits, regardless of how they get them. Over many years they have proved that nutrient-deficient foods are more profitable than real, nutritious foods. These big food industries fully know that the processed foods they sell you are ruining your health. Malnourishment is more profitable than nourishment.

In many ways, big food can be compared to big tobacco a few decades ago. Big tobacco said that smoking was not harmful to your health, when even the dumbest people could see that smokers coughed more and were less fit. In the same way, people who eat factory-made processed foods are fatter and sicker than those who eat clean, real food.

The thirteen processed food essentials

1. Addictive. If you can make your foods addictive you will lock in profits, year after year. Your customers will also eat more. Sugar is the cheapest and most addictive ingredient, especially fructose or high fructose corn syrup. Other hard-to-give-up ingredients commonly used include highly-refined salt, caffeine, caseinates and casomorphins. Your goal is not to satisfy, but rather to induce repeated purchases.
2. Long shelf life. Ideally your food is tough and inert, so it won't be damaged in rough transport, and will last in harsh conditions for years. Avoid soft, delicate perishables which cut deeply into your profits because they need gentle handling, cooling, care and attention. A combination of fat, sugar and refined salt is also good at preventing mould.
3. Attractive packaging. Use pictures of happy, healthy, active, attractive people enjoying your product. Associate your product with love, social connection and success. Alternatively, use pictures of happy, healthy farms, plants and animals. There is no need that they bear any resemblance to the places where you get your ingredients.
4. Deceptive marketing. The three key words you must use to describe your products are "natural", "healthy" and "approved". You can buy a tick of approval from associations professing to protect the public from heart disease, cancer and various other ailments, usually with no changes or only trivial changes to your product. These associations understand the needs of the big processed food industries, and are happy to promote low-fat products, sweet dairy products, food additives, sweeteners and all sorts of corrupt food practices provided that your support and sponsorship is sufficient.
5. Your spending priorities. Spend most of your effort and expense on packaging and marketing. A dollar spent on beautiful packaging or on a successful marketing campaign brings far higher returns than a dollar spent on better-quality ingredients. In fact, money spent on quality ingredients is wasted. Your customers will be quite oblivious to what they are actually eating if you have followed all my rules correctly.
6. Cheap. Your foods must appear to be cheap. The immediate appearance is what matters. The individual item should have a low price, and look large and good value. Don't worry - remarkably few consumers care or even notice that they have got no nutrition in exchange for their money. They have no idea that in the long run, cheap food is actually life-threateningly expensive.
7. Convenient. Your food must be easily and cheaply available 24 hours per day, with no effort. Unlike real foods and clean foods which must be purchased fresh and then prepared with time and effort, a profitable processed food is available in seconds (tear open the packet) or minutes (microwave or heat a box).
8. Your target customers. Your most profitable customers are those who are lazy, time-poor, low income, less educated, less intelligent, gullible, watch lots of TV and other advertising, addiction-prone, and unwilling to take responsibility for their own health and lives ("blame it on anyone/anything but me"). The younger you can catch them, the better.
9. Flavouring. A good processed food provides a highly flavoured, mouth-satisfying sensation for just a second or two, leaving an overwhelming desire for the next mouthful. The ingredients required to do this are sugars, chemical flavourings, refined salt, glutamates, caseinates and hundreds of other chemicals that blast the taste buds and keep you hungry and addicted. To save on your costs, excellent synthetic chemical flavourings are available, which are cheaper and virtually indistinguishable in taste and smell from real ingredients.
10. Ease of swallowing and mouth feel. A successful processed food swallows easily, and does not provide any sensation of fullness in the stomach. Fats and emulsifiers are vitally important for a beautiful, rich, silky, satisfying texture that can slide down the throat with ease. Use oils made from seeds, grains and legumes, which are much cheaper than naturally-occurring fats. To help with the shelf life of your product, some of these vegetable oils last for years, especially if you use oils that are refined or hydrogenated.
11. Satiety. Use a variety of chemicals which shut down the biological pathways that tell your customers that they are full. Most of these chemicals shut down their satiety hormones, but some also get the food to quickly pass through their stomachs so they can eat more, and sooner.
12. Deceptive labelling. Do everything you can to avoid explaining in plain English what is in your food products. Fight transparent and honest labelling in every possible way. Claim that the cost of listing the ingredients you are using on your label will dramatically increase the cost of your product (even though it is obvious that you are intimately familiar with the ingredients that you use, and it would cost nothing to list them on your label). You will be delighted how easily a good media consultant can convince both the public and the legislators that it is difficult, time-consuming, complex and ruinously costly to print an honest label.
    
    If legislators still insist on printing something on your product's label, then lobby for the following:
    
    Minimum contents. Get them to agree that you don't have to list an ingredient unless it is above a certain percentage. This technique works especially well when you use a processed food (such as a ready-made sauce) in your own product. This is also invaluable if you are using genetically modified products (GMOs) in your ingredients. Nearly three-quarters of all the processed food consumed in the USA contains GMOs, but the vast majority of Americans are completely unaware of this.
    
    Misleading words. Use euphemisms like "natural vegetable protein" rather than real names like monosodium glutamate.
    
    Abbreviations. Use meaningless letters and numbers like "621" or "E621" rather than the names of the ingredients.
13. Secrecy. Remember that you are selling a carefully researched and developed commercial food product, not a traditional, natural or real food. Your product may be the outcome of years of painstaking and expensive research, and you are entitled to treat it as a valuable proprietary business secret. Do everything you can to protect your ingredients list, the techniques that you use to process and package your food product, especially the heating (cooking), pressurisation, enzymes and catalysts, chemical manipulation and other means you use.