Basically take anything homogeneous, add gum, add air, create a foam. Basically like an Aero bar but with way smaller bubbles.
You just cut a quarter (I'm guessing on this figure) off your ice-cream ingredients by weight and you can now advertise "scoops from the freezer"!
It's genius but just a more complex version of putting all the pizza toppings in the little window, or having the coleslaw tub be much wider at the top, or putting everything in a wide plastic skirt so the box is 20% bigger than it needs to be, ... packaged food sellers are scumbags.
And while I think the whipped foods are stupid, I don't think that packaged food sellers are necessarily scumbags. They're merely people responding to incentives, just like everyone else. The food market has razor-thin margins and consumers are ill-informed. Neither consumers (who are hard to inform) nor regulators (who are captive to the multinational conglomerates) have been able to push back more strongly than the profit incentive, so the so dark patterns like those you describe are inevitable.
So these whipped products seem pretty useful.
My kids eat a lot of creamcheese sandwiches. Block cream cheese just destroys sliced bread.
The products in that category that have been puffed up with air (and don't meet this minimum) get sold as "dairy desserts".
(I don't work on the food industry, so I won't be shocked if I got details wrong.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR3Z028prSU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8t7u5mupS4
I don't think I'd want to eat that
There is no way i would eat something linke that.
These days the trend seems to be to reduce the packaging, at least here in the UK. "Same size - less packaging!". So it seems like reduced packaging and distribution costs, and perhaps fitting more onto store shelves, outweighs any extra sales from customers who are fooled into thinking the product is bigger than it really is?
I'm not a chemist but I've recently come to realize that the meaning of the term in the popular psyche has probably changed over the decades, taking on largely negative connotations, because of its association with a small subset of materials (albeit large by volume), most of which are either toxic, a pollution problem, or both.
AFAIU, in industry "plastics" is just a blanket term for moldable organic materials that chemists are constantly inventing. They're not necessarily sourced from petroleum, nor necessarily toxic. It's a ridiculously huge category of material, and plastics really were and probably always will figure prominently in our future. And I would assume that some traditional, even edible materials have been subsumed into the plastics category given the general scope of the term and the industry itself.
https://www.eater.com/2016/8/8/12403338/subway-yoga-mat-chem...
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/03/06/286886095/al...
Sodium carbonate is sometimes used as an alternative to lye for those who don't want to deal with the safety aspect of handling lye, as lye is very caustic. Of course, lye still provides the best results.
Lye-pickled fish is also a thing (lutefisk)!
Logically though, refrigeration based transport is not a concern for any fast food company. They use ingredients that absolutely must be transported cold, thus the cost of adding another menu item that must be shipped cold to that list is immaterial (even at scale).
Mcflurry ingredients: https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/mcflurry-with-ore... (no mention of plastic)
That's actually incorrect, they list two plastics there. It's just that "plastic" isn't something that is actually necessarily toxic, and the media misuse the terminology all the time.
The two are:
> Cellulose Gum, Guar Gum
It probably sounds insane, but someone from a plastics company spoke at my high school and said this was the case since it was easier to ship and needed no refrigeration. Now, decades later, I'm wondering if this was just complete nonsense or had an element of truth to it. I've been able to find nothing online.