Pulsed-taste Candy

In recent psychological studies, Dan Arieli has shown something that is pretty obvious and yet powerful. It is better to have good things with breaks in the middle; that's how you enjoy the good things more. Each start is important and you do not habituate to the "goodness" of it, and thus making it boring. (A side note is that the bad things should be lumped together, to get them over with and to habituate to them. Something most people don't do).

Integrating this concept to candy, which is (I believe "by definition") a good thing, results in something that is lacking in the candy repertoire: a pulsed-taste candy. This means that the good taste of the candy should come in pulses, with breaks in the middle of neutral taste. Candy usually are "optimized" to either very good taste in the beginning (which sometimes have some after-taste), or "lasting taste", which habituates the usefulness and enjoyability of the taste.

My proposition is to engineer a candy that has good-neutral-good-neutral-etc. sequence of tastes. How to do that? I can think of two possible methods. The first is layered candy, meaning that the candy has several, hopefully more than four, layers that are either licked or sucked. Thus, each layer is exposed in a sequence slowly during the process. The key here is to have neutral-taste layers, such that the mouth (and us) "forget" the good taste and do not habituate to it. The next layer, after the neutral one, is again delicious, hopefully in another taste that again triggers our enjoyment.

The second option is to chemically engineer the substrates of the candy, such that the decomposition in the mouth, due to the enzymes that degrades the candy, release different tastes in a sequence. This is obviously much harder, but I believe still plausible way to go about it.

The point in both of these is to have long-lasting enjoyable taste and the good feeling of a tasty candy. I believe that my proposition is better equipped than simply have a long lasting single taste.

To summarize, good things should be pulses: good-neutral-good-neutral. I suggest to extend this concept to candy such that tastes will be better appreciated. Bon appetite!