Food Color and Its Impact on Taste/Flavor Perception

Color is perhaps the single most important product-intrinsic sensory cue when it comes to setting our expectations regarding the likely taste and flavor of food and drink. To date, a large body of research has demonstrated that changing the hue or intensity/saturation of the color of a variety of different food and beverage items exerts a sometimes dramatic impact on the expectations, and often on the subsequent taste/flavor experiences of participants in the lab, as well as consumers under the more naturalistic conditions of everyday life. It is important to note that food colors can have rather different meanings, and hence give rise to differing expectations in these different age groups, not to mention in those from different cultures. By gaining a better understanding of the sensory and hedonic expectations that are elicited by food color in different groups of individuals, researchers are now coming to better understand the various ways in which what we see can modulate the multisensory perception of flavor, and alter our food behaviors.