Have you ever wondered what makes you go to the supermarket – or to the nearest kiosk late at night – just to buy chips? What makes you, once you try a potato chips, not leave the package in your hands until you have emptied it?
The magic word for this behavior is “crispy”.
Yeah Al that sounds pretty crap to me, Looks like BT aint for me either. If you think about it, it makes sense since huge restaurant or fast food chains have invested in their crunchy foods to advertise their listings. Crispy french fries, crispy chicken wings and so on.
More specifically, the use of crispy / crispiness in US reviews on Yelp has increased by 20 percent in the last decade. In nearly 7,000 menus analyzed by Stanford researcher Dan Jurafsky, crispy is by far the most common adjective used to describe the texture of food. Cheesecake Factory, for example, uses the words crisp or crispy almost 50 times in a menu.
Researchers have found that people find crunchy food “attractive” and “enjoyable” and that they often associate crunchy food sounds with the words “fun” and “pleasant”.
And somehow, crunchy foods have flooded our diet (and our lives).
Of course, our predictable but glaring obsession with crunchy food has sparked an entire food and marketing industry that serves it.
But why do we love it so much? How do we see, hear and taste it? What exactly is; Who the hell makes it all so crunchy? Keep reading, and eating your chips, as long as we explain.
The study of crunchy food began in the food lab that gave birth to Jell-O jelly desserts, instant coffee and a range of breakfast cereals, General Foods (now owned by Kraft Heinz). Scientists did not pay much attention to the texture of food until legendary General Foods researcher Alina Szczesniak made it clear in the 1950s.
As he said: “Everyone is obsessed with the taste of food and we are completely unaware of how important texture is for the tasting experience.” The other scientists had nothing but to agree.
Szczesniak, who died in 2016, presented a scientific series for evaluating the texture of food based on eight properties, such as hardness and elasticity, called aesthetic profiles. Crisp is a “diet stimulant,” Szczesniak wrote with a colleague, “and it seems to occupy a special place in the basic psychology of appetite and hunger satiety, forcing one to continue eating.” Does it make sense? Absolutely.
To assess “crunchiness”, he had to measure the force needed by a bite of food to break. Her team used human panels to test the texture, but also invented some machines, including the Texturometer, a mechanical mouthpiece (with blades, not teeth) that measures crispness and other features. Today Frito-Lay and its competitors have their own versions of the Texturometer to measure the crispness of their products.
What did General Foods do with this data? The company appeared in supermarket aisles with crispy cereals, frozen foods and packaged snacks as Americans began to spend more and more time in front of the television. How convenient?
Equally important, of course, is the packaging of crunchy food
The bags for example the chips are inflated with air with nitrogen that keeps them fresh. Packaging is also the way they promote the crunchy product. Yes, this “pop” you hear when you open the bag and the air is released. Classic Lay’s bags, for example, have recently been refurbished and on the back is a list of words like “CRUSH!” up – where they know that consumers’ eyes go first because, of course, they are experimenting with consumer behavior.
And of course in the bag there is the photo of the single oval chip — no crumbs all around — on the front of the bag. Katie Ceclan, a marketing executive at Frito-Lay, says this is because consumers associate crumbs with broken chips at the bottom of the bag.
Another thing that “whets our appetite” is the sound that a potato makes as soon as you bite it. That’s why, if you’ve noticed, in every ad you hear this characteristic sound of someone chewing chips.
When we bite crunchy food, the gnashing of our teeth reaches from our jaw to our ears. We hear it and we feel it. It’s a huge part of why we find crunchy food so exciting. In a study by the University of Oxford published in 2015, people bit 180 Pringles while listening to the feedback sound of their bite. The researchers found that the louder the sound, the crispier the chips looked.
In a bacon study on the other hand, the sound of crispy bacon was just as important for people to enjoy the smell and taste. Frito-Lay measured the crispness of the products in decibels, mainly to “maintain the identity of the brand”, confirming that the Cheetos are consistently crunchy, year after year. They once confirmed loudly that Doritos make the loudest crack.
Can you resist crunchy food?
Read also:
Rules of the Game: A new series inspired by the #MeToo movement and the Harvey Weinstein scandal
What is the psychological impact of the pressure of losing another kilo?
know city
Follow Skai.gr on Google News
and be the first to know all the news
.
I have worked in the news industry for over 10 years. I have a vast amount of experience in covering health news. I am also an author at News Bulletin 247. I am highly experienced and knowledgeable in this field. I am a hard worker and always deliver quality work. I am a reliable source of information and always provide accurate information.
