How Sweet It Is
Virtually everything you can buy in a supermarket that’s not an outer-aisle pure food like milk or kohlrabi has been fiddled with to make you shiver with bliss — which will in turn make you buy the product again and again. The term “bliss point,” in fact, is used in the soft-drink business to denote the optimal level of sugar at which the beverage is most pleasing to the consumer. As a manufacturer, you don’t want to surpass or come up short of the bliss point because you’ll lose sales. By the same token, you want to locate the lower end of the bliss-point spectrum (and it is a spectrum, rather than a fixed point), because otherwise you’re just wasting money on unneeded sugar.
This is from David Kamp. Here is more.
Sounds like the point of Optimal Taxation on the Laffer Curve.
Bet soft-drink balance sheets look much better than the Feds.
Bernanke never struck me as particularly blissful anyway.
Harley, you can hardly compare companies actually subject to fair accounting standards to the government!
What is worse is that through one subsidy or another, the government subsidizes the lab creations that a majority of Americans call food. If you stick to the periphery, you will be healthy. The large food companies tinker with “food” like science experiments and its just one reason why America is becoming so fat. Howard Moskowitz was the pioneer of using conjoint analysis or maximum difference scaling techniques in the food industry. Unfortunately, it makes a lot of sense if you’ve taken a basic marketing class.
http://www.freakonomics.com/2013/03/21/the-most-bountiful-food-in-human-history/
“It has been my gut-level (sorry, pun) feeling for a while now that the McDonald’s McDouble, at 390 Calories, 23g (half a daily serving) of protein, 7% of daily fiber, 20% of daily calcium and iron, etc., is the cheapest, most nutritious, and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history.”
From McDonalds nutrition website:
http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/food/product_nutrition.sandwiches.465.mcdouble.html
390 Calories
23g Protein
19g Fat (29%)
33g Carbs (11%)
850mg Sodium (35%)
I honestly don’t like modern society and the direction in which this country and the world is headed into. The moment I have to depend on others to dictate what kinds of food I can eat, is the moment we’ve gone too far. Try growing your own food and never go to a supermarket again, I’m sure you’ll have an easy time in today’s society.
It’s all about making money, whether it’s with the help of the feds or without. Ethics in business and governance is nice concept rarely put into practice. Study psychological disponsitions of group think in human nature and you’ll realize how easy it is to brainwash people into feeling bliss about things that adversely affect them but may seem harmless or good for them because others are doing it.
Yet another reason why I’ve sworn off coke!
What Moss did that caused fast food chains to stop using slime-augmented meat as part of their ingredients was so clever. If only they could do this with every other fattening product out there to avoid so much junk consumption in this country and finally promote healthy eating habits. That would save so much money on anti-obesity campaigns and so forth, and also keep so many people from dying and getting sick from terrible eating habits.
Wow, this is so interesting. I wonder if Starbucks does the same thing with their coffee, could something similar be the reason for why people are willing to pay $5 to $6 bucks for coffee.
I wonder what they do with all the new kind of drinks that has “zero” calories. How do they attain the same sweet spot given the artificial sugar.
I strongly agree with Ryan’s comment. These days is almost much safer to simply grow your own food instead of eating out or buying it at the store…you are 100% certain of what you are eating. This article makes you realize how far food-business owners are willing to go just to sell their products and how to get more consumers. Here is one of the many reasons why America’s obesity rates are so high. People simply choose not to eat right, and on top of that, businesses “force” them into unhealthy eating behaviors. Scary.
I “fiddle with” my foods all the time to reach the bliss point, adding sugar to tea, the grossly over roasted coffee that everyone else seems to like, unripe fruit that didn’t develop enough sugar on its own, cookies, pies, cakes, pastry cream, puddings, sweet roll dough, and some sauces.
So what?
From a utilitarian economic perspective, we humans are simply maximizing our “taste utils” given the resources we have available to us. I’m not complaining that food of today tastes as good as it does.