THE SCIENCE OF
OUR first instincts about the food we choose are in response to what food looks like – not least, what colour it is. Chrissy Beedle executive manager of research and product development at Slo-Jo explains why adults and children select the food and drinks they do based on colour and flavour.
Are we being tricked by the colour of food?
More than half of our cortical area is used for processing sight, but 1-2% is used for processing taste – making the weighting our intellect gives to the importance of sight over flavour very clear.
This is why food manufacturers use devices to monitor the consistency of colour during production. For example, the hue of orange juice in the US is carefully controlled, and the Munsell standards authority prescribes colour standards for everything from French fries to cherries.
The impact of appearance on flavour has been studied extensively, with researchers having great fun tricking their test subjects. Some examples include an orange-coloured cherry drink (that test subjects reported tasted of orange flavour rather than cherry) and a red-coloured sauvignon blanc wine (that test subjects described using words associated with the red wine).
Our minds immediately expect particular flavours when seeing food of a particular colour, largely because of our previous experiences and colour associations of similar food we’ve had before. For this reason, we expect yellow foods to taste sweet, because of the flavour profiles of bananas, or sour, because of the flavour profiles of lemons or grapefruit.
Every now and then, food manufacturers try to change things up a little, with Heinz being a great example with its multi-coloured ranges of tomato sauce a few years ago. While blue, orange or green tomato sauces sound like fun, there’s a disconnect between what we’re seeing and what we’re expecting to taste. While it may have been a great marketing ploy at the time, the fact that you can now only