Another reason is optimization for profit, combined with competition making it a survival necessity to do this.
Early in a nascent industry, you focus on the core product. You bring scale and scope economies. You make the supply chain more efficient. You improve the logistics. More abundant basic food stuffs for everyone, and more profits for agriculture shareholders. A true win-win.
Later on when the industry matures, the easy wins are all gone. Logistics and agriculture is fully optimized. The only scope for improvement is in marketing, adding sweeteners, and cutting out expensive ingredients. Now it's a lose-win, but from the shareholders perspective only, it's a win.
The problem is, you can't just ask companies to act nicely. While that would be a good start, even if they genuinely wanted to, competition largely forces their hand. The solution is careful and minimal regulation, to deter the pathological late-stage optimizations.
This is what always frustrates me: why do companies need to bother with "pathological late stage optimisations" at all, if not for perverse incentives in the fundamental economic and political structure of how companies operate? Why is reaching a growth plateau perceived as stagnation instead of success? Why must a company feel pressured to grow forever, without bound? What's wrong with building a business to sustainability and equilibrium? Why does this almost never happen? Why do we instead see enshittification literally EVERYWHERE?
Cause some sociopath name Friedman wrote something that the ruling class/ generationally wealthy loved. That business should only serve the owner to the expense of literally everything else.
Since the rich and powerful get what they want. This race to the bottom mentality has saturated anything where a company accepts outside investment. This means any public company and any investment into the company outside of a bank loan. Which is basically every company nowdays since private equity company have bought stake in literally almost everything.
Early in a nascent industry, you focus on the core product. You bring scale and scope economies. You make the supply chain more efficient. You improve the logistics. More abundant basic food stuffs for everyone, and more profits for agriculture shareholders. A true win-win.
Later on when the industry matures, the easy wins are all gone. Logistics and agriculture is fully optimized. The only scope for improvement is in marketing, adding sweeteners, and cutting out expensive ingredients. Now it's a lose-win, but from the shareholders perspective only, it's a win.
The problem is, you can't just ask companies to act nicely. While that would be a good start, even if they genuinely wanted to, competition largely forces their hand. The solution is careful and minimal regulation, to deter the pathological late-stage optimizations.