Re:I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API
by cavisne on Thursday October 22, 2020 @06:25PM
(#24863931)
Plenty of dieters do this themselves with protein fluff/"ice cream" (protein shakes with ice and xanthum gum). Overweight people almost by definition eat by volume not by calories (ie they eat more than their body needs for caloric maintenance).
So these whipped products seem pretty useful.
Re:I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API
by csours on Thursday October 22, 2020 @05:25PM
(#24863464)
Whipped cream cheese is much easier to spread, in my experience. I know I could whip it myself, but why not just buy it that way?
Re:I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API
by joshuak on Thursday October 22, 2020 @06:20PM
(#24863891)
For me it's because I don't add xanthan gum, and I get a bulk discount on air.
Re:I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API
by milesvp on Thursday October 22, 2020 @06:11PM
(#24863831)
Yup, also generally same cost by weight.
My kids eat a lot of creamcheese sandwiches. Block cream cheese just destroys sliced bread.
Re:I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API
by scythe on Thursday October 22, 2020 @09:43PM
(#24865239)
Essentially all cream cheese, whipped or otherwise, contains gums anyway. "Real" cream cheese is kinda grainy whenever I've seen it.
Re:I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API
by wtracy on Thursday October 22, 2020 @05:45PM
(#24863639)
It's not entirely true that regulators haven't plushed back: in the USA, there's a minimum amount of cream required before the vendor can call the product "ice cream".
The products in that category that have been puffed up with air (and don't meet this minimum) get sold as "dairy desserts".
(I don't work on the food industry, so I won't be shocked if I got details wrong.)
Re:I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API
by wnissen on Friday October 23, 2020 @01:53PM
(#24872051)
Which is exactly why McDonalds menus list "cones" and "sundaes". Not "ice cream cones". It's a frozen dairy dessert that is not legally ice cream. To be fair, McDonald's version is superior to any other fast food frozen dairy desserts that I've had.
And while I think the whipped foods are stupid, I don't think that packaged food sellers are necessarily scumbags. They're merely people responding to incentives, just like everyone else. The food market has razor-thin margins and consumers are ill-informed. Neither consumers (who are hard to inform) nor regulators (who are captive to the multinational conglomerates) have been able to push back more strongly than the profit incentive, so the so dark patterns like those you describe are inevitable.