It isn't, you just have to look. Most of the organic ice creams are fairly clean - Yeo Valley, Duchy. Similarly the organic vegan ice creams from Booja Booja. Some small producers are good - Alder Tree in Suffolk typically have 3 ingredients (cream, sugar, fruit) and are delicious. Saffron (around Saffron Walden) are great too.
It's interesting you note Yeo Valley because I've found their products very mixed - lots of them do have UPFs. It's interesting that their ice cream doesn't.
There's no Waitrose within 50 miles of me (East Midlands) so Duchy not available. Booja Booja is all dairy free so I wouldn't really consider it ice cream. But in any case it all has coconut oil in it.
Which Yeo Valley products have UPFs? Genuinely interested since that's not my experience. They do put cornflour in their fruit yogurts, but that seems less egregious than most. Their frozen kefir does contain stabilisers.
You shouldn't dismiss Booja Booja. It's nut based and in my opinion excellent. A touch sweet, but a great mouthfeel - less cloying than dairy ice creams, but clearly creamy. The chocolate salted caramel (my favourite) contains no coconut oil. I'm not sure why coconut oil is problematic though.
>They do put cornflour in their fruit yogurts, but that seems less egregious than most.
These are UPFs. The point of adding cornflour or starches is to make them thicker and more luxurious in terms of the way they feel in your mouth without straining them like greek yoghurt to reduce water i.e. they're able to do it with less milk protein and fats = it's cheaper. They do this because you need 3-4x as much raw ingredient to do achieve the same result. Adding fruit purees which is the way they add most fruit to the yoghurts is similarly UPF.
There's a scale called NOVA which categorises products based on the amount of processing. Plain Yeo Valley yoghurt is fine and would be classed as NOVA group 1. Their yoghurts would be NOVA group 3 or 4 and so either processed or ultra processed. This isn't to say that all UPFs are bad but it's become so normalised that everything is ultraprocessed that we don't even realise it.
My wife's sister is a food scientist and this is literally her day job at a large American conglomerate with substantial UK operations - try to reduce cost of production by reformulating products while maintaining the same flavour/texture profile.
Fruit yogurts are immediately group 3 even for one you'd make at home - a fruit compote is group 3. Since cornflour is group 2, it can form a component of a group 3 product. That is, cornflour is an acceptable additive in group 3 products.