Howard Moskowitz engineered the modern food supply.
He is the psychophysicist who mapped the “bliss point”—the precise concentration of sugar, salt, and fat at which liking peaks and then declines. Below it, the product is under-stimulating. Above it, it becomes cloying. At the peak, people keep eating.
Moskowitz applied this systematically. He ran large sensory panels for Prego, optimizing chunkiness, sweetness, and salt until sales rose. He did the same for soft drinks, soups, and snacks for Pepsi, Kraft, and others. The method is straightforward: vary one ingredient across a range, plot hedonic ratings, and formulate to the top of the inverted-U curve.
Companies paid him because it reliably increased consumption.
He has been clear that this does not create pharmacological addiction. It simply maximizes palatability so that satiety signals are overridden by sensory reward. The practical result is hyper-palatable products that drive higher intake than whole foods of the same caloric density.
The data are consistent with what we observe in ultraprocessed food trials: when people are given free access to foods optimized around these sensory peaks, they eat more. Moskowitz’s work shows the mechanism was deliberate and measurable decades ago.
