When Food Can Engineer Pleasure, What Does Quality Mean?

The Pantry Pulse, 23 September 2026.

On 23 September FoodNavigator reported that Hershey’s new Creme bars are built around a thin chocolate shell that snaps, followed by a gooey layer and a creamy one, a sign that texture is now being sold as the premium itself. The company calls this “accessible premium.” The flavor matters, but the architecture is doing much of the selling. The bar is supposed to announce itself in sequence: sound, fracture, flow, creaminess.

A generation ago that would have been an unusually technical way to describe candy. The Associated Press recently documented food companies chasing crispier, chewier and gooier products around the world. The Specialty Food Association made “SenseMaxxing” its 2026 trend of the year, pointing to exaggerated sourness, bubbles, shattering coatings and crunch designed for acoustic impact.

None of this is sinister. Food is physical, and people like physical things. After half a day spent touching the same sheet of glass, a candy that crackles or a licorice with a hard shell and chewy center can feel almost defiantly real.

But texture is doing two jobs at once. It gives pleasure, and it also gives information.

For a long time, the sensations associated with good food also said something about the food. Crispness could signal freshness. The snap of chocolate could reflect proper temper. A dark crust meant something had happened in an oven. Viscosity might suggest concentration or fat. None of those cues was a perfect measure of quality, but each carried information. Food science can now tune snap and crunch directly, which leaves an open question about what “good” means.

When the signal becomes the product

This is not an argument that engineered food is inferior. Cooking itself is engineering with older equipment.

A chocolatier tempers chocolate so that its cocoa butter settles into the one crystal form that gives gloss and snap. A chili crisp maker leaves fried solids in aromatic oil for crunch (see the chili crisp guide). Flaky salt has broad, thin crystals that break apart on the tongue in a way fine salt does not (shop Saltverk flaky sea salt).

The harder case begins when the sensation can be tuned separately from the thing it used to signal. Whisky got there early.

For decades, an age statement was one of the easiest quality shortcuts in Scotch. Twelve sounded better than ten, and eighteen better than twelve. The shortcut is crude, since great wood can do more in a younger whisky than tired wood does in an older one. Still, the number was legible. It told buyers something real about time.

Prices for mature whisky have risen, and no-age-statement expressions have multiplied. Macallan’s 1824 Series was among the most conspicuous examples (see Macallan’s 1824 Series page). Gold, Amber, Sienna and Ruby replaced age-statement bottlings in some markets, starting with the UK, and asked buyers to pay attention to natural color, cask influence and flavor instead.

What changed was which signal the consumer was asked to privilege. Age had been the shortcut, and color and cask character were offered in its place. Quality heuristics are not laws of nature. People learn them, and companies can try to teach new ones.

That matters far beyond whisky. If buyers learn that dark means rich, creamy means indulgent, crunchy means fresh or layered texture means premium, those attributes acquire value of their own, and the cue itself becomes worth engineering.

When a quality signal becomes a design target, it stops being reliable evidence of quality.

The cue may still be genuine. It just carries less evidence than it used to.

The people who knew a lot about the next one

The economics are where this stops being a sensory story. Companies optimize against a business problem: ingredient cost, shelf life, making a reduced-sugar yogurt feel creamy, persuading a customer to choose one candy bar over another and then buy it again.

American packaged food has a peculiar historical connection to an industry that knew a great deal about repeat consumption. Philip Morris acquired General Foods in 1985 and Kraft in 1988, and went on to combine them as Kraft General Foods, according to Altria’s company history. For a period, Marlboro and some of America’s most familiar packaged-food brands sat under the same corporate parent.

That fact has become more consequential as researchers have looked back at what those companies sold. A study published in Addiction compared foods owned by tobacco companies with foods that were not tobacco-owned between 1988 and 2001. Using a published quantitative definition of hyper-palatable foods, the researchers found tobacco-owned products were 29 percent more likely to fall into the fat-and-sodium category and 80 percent more likely to fall into the carbohydrate-and-sodium category.

That does not prove that an executive walked out of a cigarette meeting and ordered Kraft scientists to addict people to crackers. It does make the institutional overlap harder to wave away.

A 2026 American Journal of Public Health case study of Lunchables, summarized by UCSF, used internal company documents to trace the product's development under Philip Morris ownership. The study concluded that one reason Philip Morris purchased food businesses was the opportunity to increase revenue by sharing proprietary research and development across tobacco and food product lines. Philip Morris used its cigarette science on “how the brain processes flavors and what motivates consumers at the deepest levels” to design food products, the paper's author, Laura Schmidt, told UCSF.

Food businesses had their own deep expertise in the same areas. Put them inside one corporate system and the practical question was never whether consumer behavior could be studied. It was what the knowledge would be used to optimize.

“Hyper-palatable” needs some restraint. It is a research classification based on combinations of fat, sugar, carbohydrate and sodium, not a diagnosis that a food is addictive. A 2019 paper that formalized the definition found that 62 percent of foods in a large U.S. database met at least one criterion, which shows how broad the category is.

A more useful distinction comes from reward research. Neuroscientist Kent Berridge and colleagues separate hedonic “liking” from motivational “wanting.” The two usually cooperate, but not always. Anyone who has eaten one superb piece of aged cheese and felt finished understands the distinction in miniature. The best bite of the week does not necessarily create the strongest urge for twenty more.

The bite after the bite

Charles Duhigg gave popular language to another part of this in The Power of Habit: cue, routine, reward. The model is simplified, but the practical move is useful. Stop treating a repeated behavior as one act and notice what sets it in motion.

He wrote about gambling for a reason. In research he discussed, problem gamblers and casual gamblers watched slot-machine outcomes while their brains were scanned. For pathological gamblers, near misses produced reward-related responses much more like wins, while casual gamblers were better at registering them as losses. Slot machines had also been reprogrammed to deliver a more constant supply of near wins.

To someone without a gambling habit, much of that is noise. To a person whose brain has learned the sequence, the same cue arrives loaded. Food does not need to be equated with gambling for the lesson to travel.

The smell when the bag opens. The first crack of a shell. The salt that arrives before the sweetness. The bowl beside the sofa. The sight of the package at 3 p.m. The last bite gone so quickly nobody remembers chewing it.

Some of those things make food better. Some merely make the routine easier to enter. Some do both. At a snack bowl, the useful question is almost embarrassingly simple:

What just made me want the next bite?

Texture complicates that question. It can increase sensory reward, and it can also change the speed at which food disappears. Research on oral processing has repeatedly found that harder, chewier, thicker or more structurally persistent foods generally take longer to eat. A controlled crossover study found that texture-based differences in eating rate contributed to differences in how much people ate.

So food engineering has no single direction. The knowledge that can make one snack vanish quickly can make another food more satisfying, keep a yogurt creamy after sugar reduction, give a high-protein bar a better chew, or make a candy more fun.

The technology is not the issue. The optimization target is.

That distinction also keeps texture from taking the blame for everything wrong with industrial food. In Kevin Hall’s controlled NIH trial, participants offered an ultra-processed diet consumed about 508 additional calories per day compared with an unprocessed diet, even though the presented diets were matched on several nutritional dimensions. The trial demonstrated a real intake difference. It did not establish that texture alone caused it.

When appetite itself changes

For the snack business, volume has been a friendly variable. A product that people enjoy, finish and repurchase is a successful product.

GLP-1 drugs complicate that equation because they act upstream of the package. The Specialty Food Association's phrase for the result is recalibrated hunger signals, and it gave the larger shift its own 2026 name, the Appetite Reset. Food companies are already adjusting. Reuters reported in August that ice-cream makers are betting consumers still want treats, just healthier ones.

This may turn out to be one of the more consequential changes in packaged food, because it alters the economic problem. If a customer wants less volume, success can no longer mean moving more product through the same mouth. Companies may have to earn more from less. Smaller portions, more protein or fiber, premium positioning and more elaborate texture all become plausible responses. So does a better product, if a customer eating less becomes choosier about what earns a place.

GLP-1s may force Big Food to compete for fewer bites.

Whether that produces better food depends, again, on what companies choose to optimize. A smaller chocolate that satisfies more could be an excellent outcome. A smaller chocolate at the old price with a louder wrapper is something else, and both can be described as responding to the same trend.

The petroleum grilled cheese

Palmer Luckey carried this logic further than any packaged-food company. Before founding Anduril, the Oculus founder considered starting a company making synthetic food from petroleum-derived materials, he said in a Palmer Luckey interview. He described experimenting with mineral oil and making a paraffin-based imitation cheese. His premise was that materials engineering might reproduce the texture, melt and sensory behavior of familiar foods using substances the human body would not metabolize for meaningful energy.

None of it became an approved commercial food, and Luckey’s account is an inventor describing an abandoned experiment, not nutrition advice. As a thought experiment, though, it is hard to improve. A grilled cheese that browns, stretches and melts like the real thing while providing almost none of the calories or nutrition of bread and cheese could win a blind tasting and still leave open whether it is better food.

There is no single scoreboard left. Sensory success, ingredients, craftsmanship, nutrition, provenance, cultural meaning, satiation and value for money can all point in different directions. A BUBS gummy and a wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano do not need to compete on the same scoreboard. A heavily formulated protein snack can earn its place by being useful. A beautifully made chocolate can be calorie-dense and worth every bite.

The mistake is pretending all of those meanings of “good” collapse into “I want more.” Luckey’s petroleum sandwich just pushes every slider to the edge.

More attention, not less pleasure

This argument can go sour easily. Reading every label as an adversarial document, treating pleasure as manipulation and distrusting a gummy because somebody designed its chew would be a dreary way to eat, and a wrong one.

The better response is attention. Notice the snap of a well-tempered bar. Notice what the fried solids in chili crisp add to the oil, and the order of sensations in a piece of coated licorice. Break flaky salt between your teeth. Taste creaminess that comes from cream against creaminess rebuilt by a starch or hydrocolloid, without ranking one as morally superior.

Then notice what comes next: whether the bite satisfied or simply reset the desire for another, whether hunger had anything to do with it, whether the package was just in reach at 3 p.m. Awareness is not abstinence. It is the difference between taking part in an experience and being carried through it.

A line attributed to Carl Jung says that until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our lives and we will call it fate. Jung did not write that sentence verbatim. What he wrote in Aion was that “when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.” The paraphrase survives because the idea is useful.

Duhigg’s habit loop points the same way. Before changing an automatic behavior, see the cue, the routine and the reward as separate things. Applied to a sour gummy or a bar that snaps, what felt like one inevitable action becomes a sequence with joints in it.

Sources & Further Reading

• Associated Press, “Global customers crave texture, challenging companies to make crispier, gooier, chewier foods,” September 14, 2026.
• FoodNavigator, Hershey premiumization and texture reporting, September 23, 2026.
• Specialty Food Association, 2026 Trend of the Year: SenseMaxxing, plus The Appetite Reset.
• Inside Science (American Institute of Physics), on cocoa butter crystal forms and chocolate tempering.
• The Macallan 1824 Series; The Spirits Business on the 1824 Series launch and its replacement of age-statement expressions; Scotch Whisky reporting on mature-whisky prices and no-age-statement Scotch.
• Altria corporate history; Fazzino et al., Addiction, on tobacco ownership and hyper-palatable foods.
• University of California, San Francisco, “How Big Tobacco Helped Shape the Design of Ultra-Processed Foods,” June 2026, on Schmidt, American Journal of Public Health, 2026.
• Fazzino, Rohde and Sullivan, quantitative definition of hyper-palatable foods.
• Kent Berridge, research on liking and wanting food rewards.
• Charles Duhigg, habit-loop framework; Scientific American excerpt on gambling, near misses and habit.
• Review of food form, texture and energy intake; controlled texture and eating-rate study.
• Hall et al., Cell Metabolism, randomized inpatient trial of ultra-processed and unprocessed diets.
• Reuters, “Ice cream makers bet consumers still want treats, just healthier ones,” August 13, 2026.
• Palmer Luckey interview discussing his abandoned petroleum-derived synthetic-food experiments.
• C. G. Jung, Aion, Collected Works 9ii (Princeton University Press), paragraph 126.

Disclosure: The Ambrosian Pantry is a specialty food retailer, and product links in this article go to its shop pages. That retail relationship does not affect the analysis here.