On the psychological impact of food color

Colour is the single most important product-intrinsic sensory cue when it comes to setting
people’s expectations regarding the likely taste and flavour of food and drink. To date, a large
body of laboratory research has demonstrated that changing the hue or intensity/saturation of the
colour of food and beverage items can exert a sometimes dramatic impact on the expectations,
and hence on the subsequent experiences, of consumers (or participants in the lab). However,
should the colour not match the taste, then the result may well be a negatively valenced
disconfirmation of expectation. Food colours can have rather different meanings and hence give
rise to differing expectations, in different age groups, not to mention in different cultures.
Genetic differences, such as in a person’s taster status, can also modulate the psychological
impact of food colour on flavour perception. By gaining a better understanding of the sensory
and hedonic expectations elicited by food colour in different groups of individuals, researchers
are coming to understand more about why it is that what we see modulates the multisensory
perception of flavour, as well as our appetitive and avoidance-related food behaviours.

https://flavourjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13411-015-0031-3

Charles Spence

Flavour20154:21

https://doi.org/10.1186/s13411-015-0031-3
© Spence; licensee BioMed Central. 2015

 Received: 29 December 2014

 Accepted: 6 March 2015
 Published: 22 April 2015