An industry dedicated to making foods crispy

When I was in college, I had a roomate who interned at Frito Lay. We got a lot of "beta" samples of new stacks that weren't public - the amount of engineering that goes into making snacks on ultra high volume scale is insane. I tested a bunch of snacks and provided feedback - which goes back into the engineering iteration loop before the snack is perfected, optimized for cost and manufacturability. It was indeed fascinating. There are hundreds of parameters to optimize - for e.g. the shape of the chip can affect how much oil it can retain affecting cost, taste, nutrition, etc.

If you read the papers on palatants and food processes destined for animals, they'll increase consumption by 20, 30% easily.

Check out this patent for a horse nugget, for example: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/63/5b/ef/5e6b6bd...

So if you take that and realize there's more money in palatants for humans than in animals, that'll explain an entire obesity epidemic entirely without any other explanations.

But by dint of this fact, natural flavoring and proprietary crunchification processes and things like that are the thing which will not go away in the general movement against food additives. It's essential to the business.

One of my favorite(only?) bits of sci-fi/food-engineering trivia is that Gene Wolfe (The Book of the New Sun) was the mechanical engineer who developed the machine that cooked the first Pringles chips:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pringles#History

I’ve been oddly interested in this topic ever since I read about the process of making the Taco Bell Doritos Locos Taco. Would you happen to know a good way to learn more about food engineering?

I know that these things are optimized like crazy, but I often feel like the focus groups must just not include people like me. Most of the processed food industry makes foods that I find sickly sweet or absurdly oily, among other issues. Soda for example.

I wouldn't describe as a failing of the Coca-cola company the fact that I don't like coke. Everyone has preferences. I would describe as their utter failure the fact that the first time I enjoyed drinking a cola since age 10 was when I had an unsweetened cola-flavoured La Croix.

For the longest time I didn't understand why vending machines exist, until I went to Japan and noticed I was always within arm's reach of a refreshingly bitter tea.

I had always mentally equated that bottled drink == headache-inducing sugar rush and it necessarily had to be that way. Even when they made a sugar free drink, they just loaded it with other sweeteners.

But that was really just an optimization process gone wrong and gotten trapped in a local minimum, I guess. I hope they're starting to learn their lesson.