There's a reason why Pringles are packed in tubes that are just too small for your hands
Pringles are up there with the most popular chips. Their curved shape and tall tubes are immediately recognisable and they're notoriously irresistible.
But any Pringles fan knows the struggle of trying to grab the final chips from the bottom of the tube, getting your hand stuck and having to contort your wrist to get the final morsels out.
While it seems like a strange design choice, it was intentional.
In a new BBC two-part documentary Irresistible: Why We Can't Stop Eating, a former Pringles employee has revealed how the iconic Pringles tube has been intentionally engineered to keep us hooked.
Watch the video above.
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Sensory Food Consultant Professor Barry Smith says the Pringles tube is intentionally sized to make it difficult to get the chips out. BBC
In the documentary, Sensory Food Consultant Professor Barry Smith told doctor Chris van Tulleken that the packaging is specifically designed to encourage consumers to keep coming back for more by tricking an evolutionary part of the brain.
He explained the tubes are purposefully made to be too small for our hands to mimic the sensation of "foraging".
"When I worked for Pringles, they were really worried about the competition from Doritos and they were trying to think of ways to innovate," he said.
"One idea was let's make the tube bigger so that we can get our whole hand in there.
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He says it tricks an evolutionary part of our brain to make us want to consume more. Getty
He continued, "And I said, 'No, no don't do that'. People like struggling to have to get their hand in. They're like foraging bears. They're trying to extract the food.
"And that searching out something to eat, that's increasing your desire."
The documentary proceeded to show a snippet of an old advertisement from the company that emphasised the "pop" of the Pringles tube.
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Sonic branding is a big part of food production, Smith explains. Getty
Smith continued to explain that so many different aspects of food production matters – even the sound it makes.
"Eating is a multi sensory experience. There's the look of the food, the smell of the food, there's the feeling of the food on your fingers," he said.
"Even the sound of food matters.
"When you open a fizzy soda, you've got two noises. You've got the click and the tear. Sound engineers and manufacturers work really hard to get that sound just right and that's sonic branding."
For a packet of Pringles the sonic branding could lie in the "pop" sound of the tube opening.
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