Plus it's chemically stable to store and never goes bad. What's not to love?

Exactly. That's the point.

Food deserts aren't devoid of retail or food stores. There's plenty of places in food deserts where you can buy Tide. What is lacking in food deserts are places that sell the sorts of products that distinguish grocery stores from convenience/bodega/drugstores. Generally speaking, that's not packaged goods like Tide or other shelf-stable products. It's fresh fruits and vegetables, fish and poultry and meat, and other mostly fungible unpackaged foods.

So you wouldn't expect shoplifting in an area to be what causes a food desert, because the things that are missing from food deserts are things that are less amenable to profitable shoplifting than the things that are still in the food desert. If the food desert still has plenty of places that are selling Tide, but is missing places that sell broccoli and zucchini, it's pretty unlikely that high rates of shoplifting Tide are what has caused this situation.

Food deserts almost certainly aren't caused by shoplifting.