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.