tasting COLOR

Color plays an important role in our everyday life, affecting our thinking, emotions, and actions. With the capacity to send subliminal messages to the brain, color influences consumers not only on the conscious level but also on the subconscious level. Color and food benefit from the emotional connection to taste, influencing our expectations. What we taste is actually influenced by what we see. Our perception of aroma and flavor is affected by color; its hue, intensity, and saturation. 

Below are some consistent associations that have been made between color and taste. These are referred to as cross-modal associations (a perception that involves interactions between two or more different sensory modalities) 

red + orange with SWEET

yellow + green with SOUR

blue with SALTY

violet with BITTER and UMAMI

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Tests have verified these associations, “people will sometimes rate an appropriately colored drink (imagine a pinkish-red drink) as sweeter than an inappropriately colored (say, green) comparison drink. Such results can be obtained even if the latter drink has as much as 10% more added sugar. In other words, psychologically induced taste enhancement is indeed indistinguishable from the real thing, at least sometimes.”

When it comes to food, color is a serious business in the way we purchase. To ensure consistent hues, food companies scan their products on the line with custom colorimeters. Great care is taken to ship fruits and vegetables in chemically “modified” atmospheres, because the better the fruit color the better the price. There are judgments and standards implemented all along the food chain.  “The hue of orange juice, for example, is carefully calibrated by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Orange Juice Color Standards (Grade-A orange juice from concentrate has to be “not as good as OJ 5 but much better than OJ 6.”)  Munsell actually sells USDA Color Standards for French Fries, honey, even cherries.

We are not only influenced by the color of the food itself, but by the colors of what is containing the food as well.  “Test subjects thought coffee in a white mug tasted less sweet than in a transparent or blue mug, and that 7up had a more lemon-limey taste when more yellow was added to the packaging.” 

Imagine our future, as we create new foods, like Beyond Meat, where science and biology play a greater role, we will look more and more to color to create visual cues to satisfy our taste buds.