I have not read those articles, nor the patent links in other threads, but your description is consistent with "instant sugar"[1].
How can a vending machine add rapidly dissolving sugar to a cool beverage? Smaller sugar grains dissolve faster, but handling suffers as they cake and stick to surfaces. So you create aggregate grains - fine grains (dissolves fast) stuck together into larger ones (handles well). Sintered agglomerates.
The final sugar particles in chocolate seem relatively undissolved (pointy)[2], and sugar particles are often stabilized by coating with stuff, so a hypothetical PR faux "breakthrough" matching your description might be "instant sugar... now in chocolate!". And didn't Intellectual Ventures move into food industry trolling a few years ago, so there's likely a market for such. And this is Nestle.
How can a vending machine add rapidly dissolving sugar to a cool beverage? Smaller sugar grains dissolve faster, but handling suffers as they cake and stick to surfaces. So you create aggregate grains - fine grains (dissolves fast) stuck together into larger ones (handles well). Sintered agglomerates.
The final sugar particles in chocolate seem relatively undissolved (pointy)[2], and sugar particles are often stabilized by coating with stuff, so a hypothetical PR faux "breakthrough" matching your description might be "instant sugar... now in chocolate!". And didn't Intellectual Ventures move into food industry trolling a few years ago, so there's likely a market for such. And this is Nestle.
[1] http://www.nordicsugar.com/industry/instant-sugar/ - sales brochure, with a mediocre micrograph, under the center button. [2] http://soft-matter.seas.harvard.edu/index.php/Physicist_as_C...
Not my field, but last year I did a video to help teach scale: http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/RBigE - the "Sugar comes in different sizes" video.