Food: Colour me delicious
Manufacturers and marketers have long stuck by three “dimensions” of food — taste, texture and smell.
But now researchers are exploring the intriguing effects of colour on not just the eating experience but also the way food is advertised.
“People will talk about the taste, smell and flavour of food, but it’s only if something looks unusual that they’ll mention the colour,” said Dr Gavin Northey, a marketing lecturer at the University of Auckland’s Business School.
Evidence from his and others’ research strongly suggests that colour primes us to experience the other elements of flavour in certain ways.
For example, people fed spoonfuls of red and blue custard with identical texture will rate the red custard as creamier. And people asked to smell white wine with red colouring tend to rate it as if it were a red — even some pro- fessional wine caught out.
Northey and his fellow researchers wondered if colour influenced not only how we experience or perceive food, but what we expect it to taste, smell and feel like even before putting it in our mouths.
In the first study, participants were shown three ads with a blue or red filter over the foods.
Those who saw the blue filter were more likely to expect crunchiness in all foods.
In the second study, text tasters are indicating either creaminess or crunchiness was added to the red and blue ads.
When people saw ads with “crunchy” labels, the crossmodal effect of colour on expected texture was evident.
When ads with “creamy” labels were shown, the labels inhibited the cross-modal effect of colour.
“It seems that the concept of creaminess and the consumption of creamy foods is such a powerful, hedonic personal experience that it can interrupt automatic sensorylevel perception,” Northey said.
Northey hoped to untangle the influence of colour on expected smell and taste.
The upshot for advertisers from the expected texture studies: “Know the textural cues of colour, and make sure the palette and words you use both line up with the texture you’re trying to convey.”