Starting a food startup revealed a lot of this stuff to me. There's something called "clean labeling" which refers to the ability to put various synthetic shelf life or flavor enhancing compounds in your foods and label it as something innocuous sounding due to skirting the labeling laws. The companies that generate these compounds advertise them as such. This intersects with the fact that the FDA operates essentially on a complaint basis. That is, if they don't receive any complaints about something it is very unlikely to ever be looked in to. And how would you know to complain if the package just says "modified starch"? So it's hard to credibly differentiate yourself along this dimension since in some cases there is literally no way that the customer could tell that one company is using less crap in their food.