Sweet or Tart?

Color is just one of nature’s many cues, but it's a very important one, especially when it comes to food. There’s more than one reason you might decide to reach for the reddest apple in the produce aisle bin, but it may also surprise you to know that the color red actually heightens the perception of sweetness, so before you’ve even taken a bite, your eyes have told your brain that THIS apple is the tastiest available.

Synaesthesia - Stimulating Senses

A condition scientists call “synaesthesia” is involved, at least to some degree.  Basically, that’s what they call the process of our senses stimulating each other, crossing over each other and creating what is called a ‘sense-impression’.  (For example, the way a certain shade of green can evoke the smell of freshly-mown grass, or a yellow-green can induce or heighten a sense of sourness.)

Numerous studies have been performed over the years, to determine exactly what influence color has over what we’re tasting.  Some studies in particular I found quite interesting:

Test subjects were divided into two groups: a young adult group (18-22 years old) and an elderly group (60-75 years old). The subjects were given cherry-flavored drinks that differed in sweetness and the amount of red coloring.  Several conclusions were drawn:

• Color did not affect the perceived sweetness of the drink and did not affect the drink's ability to quench thirst.
• Color did affect flavor intensity, especially in the older group. Subjects reported that drinks with more red color tasted stronger.
• Color did affect flavor quality (how "true" it tasted).
• Color did affect overall acceptability of the drink (how much people liked the drink).
• Changes in color made people think the flavor of the drink was different. For example, if the cherry-flavored drink was colored orange or yellow, people thought it was an orange drink or fruit punch drink.

In A Nutshell ~ Color Has Impact.

While each of our senses have their own, parallel pathways to the brain, there is also a great deal of ‘crossover’ between  the senses that affect our perceptions, both positively AND negatively, and the color(s) of a product can have a profound effect on its acceptability to consumers. Color affects perception of flavor intensity, flavor quality (how 'true' it tastes), and overall acceptability of the food product. Unexpected (or 'incorrect') colors make people have difficulty identifying flavors, especially younger people.  Finally, consumers think that products with more color taste stronger, and that while a higher intensity of color increases the acceptability of a product for a consumer, it also IS possible to have 'too much' color. 

So hopefully you now have a better understanding about how color influences what we taste and how we taste it.