“ Industry insiders now talk about elevating a food’s “snackability,” which, in short, means engineering it with enough convenience that picking up a piece and putting it in your mouth becomes an almost perfunctory transaction. A snackable food is crumbless and fussless. It is most likely broken into bite-size pieces, encouraging us to eat more. If the food’s form itself doesn’t imply a portion size — the way, say, one apple or one cupcake does — there’s no obvious signal to stop. This triggers what one marketer, Barb Stuckey, calls “mindless munching” — the hand’s almost hypnotic back and forth between bag and mouth. Stuckey also explains that plucking at individualized little pieces of something is just “more fun” than dealing with a chunkier whole. So pretzels are cut down into stumpy pretzel bits, doughnuts broken into doughnut holes and regular-size carrots scrubbed and lathed into several “baby” ones. Even the Kit Kat — a candy bar designed to be easily handled in the first place — is now available as a bag of smaller Kit Kat Bites.
