[perl4ever]

There is a logical reason why I suspect artificial sweeteners are being put in many products now with as little fanfare as possible. Sucralose is made from sugar, but like other artificial sweeteners is far sweeter[1] than sugar, by around 3 orders of magnitude. I'm not sure about prices on an industrial scale, but moderately large quantities of sucralose without fillers seem to be about $50/lb, and sugar seems to be about $0.44/lb in 50 lb quantities. Thus, sucralose is around 110 times more expensive, but 300-1000 times more potent. The economic logic of treating sugar with chlorine and putting it in everything seems inescapable, as long as the public doesn't become sensitized.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucralose

Edit: I don't know whether or not McDonald's in particular is using sucralose. I'm suggesting that it's a general trend, probably helped by the general public's distaste for things like aspartame, calories, HFCS, and so on.

[maxerickson]

There's literal pennies of sugar in the typical product. They aren't pushing sucralose to get the extra bit of margin, they are responding to the large number of people that want lower calorie sweets.

[perl4ever]

I don't think the latter factor, which I mentioned, obviates the issue of cost. The cost of any ingredient is going to be "literally pennies" but that isn't an argument that it doesn't matter to the manufacturer nor that they don't try to optimize it.