Color & Taste
Color is the single most important product-intrinsic sensory cue when it comes to setting people’s expectations regarding the likely taste
According to leading gastrophyscist and director of Neuroscience at Oxford University, Prof. Charles Spence, color is the single most important product-intrinsic sensory cue when it comes to setting people’s expectations regarding the likely taste and flavor of food and drink.
"To date, a large body of laboratory research has demonstrated that changing the hue or intensity/saturation of the color 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 color not match the taste, then the result may well be a negatively valence disconfirmation of expectation."
At mycoocoon, we've play with the senses by creating synesthetic (cross-sensory) reactions using color and light technologies to influence your taste buds. Food colors 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 color on flavor perception. By gaining a better understanding of the sensory and hedonic expectations elicited by food color in different groups of individuals, researchers are coming to understand more about why it is that what we see modulates the multisensory perception of flavor, as well as our appetitive and avoidance-related food behaviors.
