I’m pretty sure it’s real. I met someone once who worked in materials research for food and they said that modelling was big there because the scope for experimentation is more limited. In materials for construction where they wanted to change a property they could play around with adding new additives and seeing what happens. For food though you can’t add anything beyond a limited set of chemicals that already have approval from the various agencies* and therefore they look at trying to fine tune in other ways.

So for chocolate, for example, they control lots of material properties by very careful control of temperature and pressure as it solidifies. This is why if chocolate melts and resolidifies you see the white bits of milk that don’t remain within the materia.

*Okay you can add a new chemical but that means a time frame of over a decade to then get approval. I think the number of chemicals that’s happened to is very very small and that’s partly because the innovation framework of capitalism is very short term.

Though worth saying that the link suggests the computing was used for aerodynamics for ensuring production wouldn’t destroy them not. For the shape as such. I’ve also seem it said that the can is part of that too.

It is quite hard to track down but here’s it being reported by the head of modelling at P&G in 2006

https://www.hpcwire.com/2006/05/05/high_performance_potato_chips/

I appreciate you are setting up a sort of platonic ideal of what science is but I think its important to deal with the real people and processes that science is performed by and we would be doing ourselves a disservice if we fail to acknowledge how those people and processes have often worked hand in hand with capitalist and colonial projects. We need to be introspective about how those choices have influenced the science (and the methods!) that’s been done. We, as scientists, engineers and science appreciators need to do this work so we can make different and better choices.

This isn’t uncommon in lots of physics calculations where you are working at the same scales a lot and its cumbersome to keep carrying the constants around and it adds risk of making a mistake.

Think of it as assuming you are working in a system of units where you measure all your speeds relative to the speed of light. So rather than saying the speed limit of a road is 30mph you would say its .000000045c.