Don’t Be Fooled by Your Chocolate Packaging
When you’re standing in a shop and there’s a new product on the shelf, and you don’t really know exactly what’s inside the packaging, do you ever buy something like that because you find the packaging very appealing? Of course you do, and naturally you’re not the only one. The marketing people behind products have almost always conducted extensive research into what performs well in that market, and the outside is often just as decisive in the purchase as the (sometimes still unknown) inside…
It’s of course pretty disappointing when the packaging itself turns out to have been incredibly misleading (or simply annoying if you feel that your least favorite is the most common one in the Celebrations mix), but packaging often plays precisely on how the human brain works. Color psychology plays an important role in branding, and various studies have been conducted into how the colors of, for example, a chocolate wrapper play a major role in people’s expectations of taste.
Lucky test subjects
One such study published in the International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science examined how the colors of chocolate packaging influenced the preferences of test subjects and how they anticipated the flavors and texture of the chocolate. The test subjects were observed to see how the colors of the wrappers influenced their expectations of, among other things, sweetness and bitterness. They tasted milk chocolate and dark chocolate (to keep things simple) wrapped in black, blue, brown, green, red, pink and yellow foil or wrappers.
Nothing is what it seems
What did they find? The expectation was almost always that the least sweet—and therefore the most bitter—chocolate would be in the black packaging, and the sweetest variety in yellow or pink. Contrary to their own expectations, the test subjects found the milk chocolate from the black wrapper to taste the best.
And what conclusion do we draw from this? Don’t let yourself be fooled when you’re standing in front of the chocolate shelf. Just try them all at least once! From Tony’s Chocolonely in every color to chocolate Easter eggs whenever they’re available again, via Celebrations and back again. Who knows, you might even be pleasantly surprised…
Also read:
- These are the most misleading products in the supermarket
- 5 times food packaging would be more honest; this is what that would look like (shocking images)
- 19 times you’re seriously being fooled in the supermarket, part 2
