Hot Chocolate’s Taste Influenced by Cup Color

Posted on 2013/01/032013/01/03 by Jason Hensel

Color is a powerful persuader. Red cars appear faster than other cars. Blue rooms are relaxing and help spur creativity. Now you can add that orange or cream-colored containers cause hot chocolate to taste better.

“The color of the container which serves food and drinks can enhance some of its attributes, such as taste or odor,” said Betina Piqueras-Fiszman, a researcher at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. The researcher worked with Charles Spence of Oxford University on the study.

The researchers conducted an experiment where 57 participants had to evaluate samples of hot chocolate served in four types of plastic cups, all the same size but of different colors: white, cream, red, and orange with white inside.

The results, published in Journal of Sensory Studies, showed that participants liked best the hot chocolate served in orange and cream-colored containers.

However, the sweetness (not the flavor) and aroma were not influenced by the cup’s color.

“There is no fixed rule to say that a taste or flavor is enhanced with a particular color or tone,” Piqueras-Fiszman said. “This actually varies with the type of food, but the fact is that, as the effect occurs, more attention should be paid to the color of the packaging, as it has more potential than you can imagine.”

This should encourage chefs and hospitality professionals to think more about the color of the tableware and packaging. For example, blue cups seem to quench thirst better, while pink packaging makes items seem more sweet.

(Story materials from SINC. Image via Flickr: Smokers High Life / Creative Commons)

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Sweet Tooth Equals a Sweet Deal

Posted on 2011/10/182011/10/19 by Jason Hensel

Your sweet tooth is more than a preference for desserts. It’s also an indicator of your personality and behavior, according to a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Let’s read the study’s abstract together:

It is striking that prosocial people are considered “sweet” (e.g., “she’s a sweetie”) because they are unlikely to differentially taste this way. These metaphors aid communication, but theories of conceptual metaphor and embodiment led us to hypothesize that they can be used to derive novel insights about personality processes. Five studies converged on this idea. Study 1 revealed that people believed strangers who liked sweet foods (e.g., candy) were also higher in agreeableness. Studies 2 and 3 showed that individual differences in the preference for sweet foods predicted prosocial personalities, prosocial intentions, and prosocial behaviors. Studies 4 and 5 used experimental designs and showed that momentarily savoring a sweet food (vs. a nonsweet food or no food) increased participants’ self-reports of agreeableness and helping behavior. The results reveal that an embodied metaphor approach provides a complementary but unique perspective to traditional trait views of personality.

The part about increased agreeableness through sweets fascinates me. Do this mean you should bring sweets with you before every meeting? What does it say about someone who doesn’t like sweets? Does a preference for chocolate over hard candy indicate a different type of sweet and agreeable personality? So many questions.

(Photo credit via Flickr: Keith Macke / Creative Commons)

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BaconFest 2011

Posted on 2011/05/242011/09/27 by Jason Hensel

We had another successful BaconFest this year, and I’d like to thank everyone who attended and everyone that entered the contest. Congratulations to our winners: Art, Michael, and Marj. Some photos can be found here.

And now, some poignant commentary.

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