Good packaging design can make food taste better
Just what is the power of packaging? We may like to think we’re immune to its appeal, but our packaging experiment reveals the design tactics that persuade you to buy and even convince you food tastes better.
The continuing recession means that supermarkets have to compete even harder for your custom.
We’ve talked about how they can use psychological tricks in the store layout to make us spend more money.
But another way supermarkets do this is by using carefully designed packaging to influence customers’ perceptions of their products.
We wanted to find out whether supermarket food packaging actually makes a difference beyond just tempting you to put it in your basket – could it change your perception of how something tastes?
Putting food packets under the microscope
So, to test just how persuasive packaging can be, we asked two groups of people to taste chocolate chip cookies from the premium, standard and budget ranges available at Asda, Sainsbury’s and Tesco. But there was a twist – one group tasted and rated the cookies without seeing any of the packaging, whereas the other group were shown the packets beforehand.
Interestingly, the group that saw the packaging first rated the cookies as being tastier and scored them more highly overall (we also tested on appearance, smell and texture) than the group that just saw the cookies. Surprisingly, the group that ate the products blind still scored the cookies in the right order of premium, standard and budget.
So, our experiment shows that there’s certainly more to packaging than meets the eye – the packaging did improve the testers’ perception of the actual product. Do these findings surprise you, or are they what you would expect?
And have you ever been lured in by gorgeous packaging only to find that the product didn’t live up to what it said on the tin?
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Di Tugwood
I’ve just purchased a pack of 6 Muller light fat free yogurt.
On the front of the pack is a large picture of 2 pieces of cheesecake.
One would assume the contents would have a biscuit base or am I expecting too much here?
The contents were a running liquid with what the back of the package describes as ‘cake pieces’
These ‘ cake pieces’, the size of grains of rice turned out to be small pieces of raw dough.
Not good enough Muller, I will not be buying your products any more
Dominc Field
My bugbear is the size of print. Lettering is so small that even with perfect eyesight it is impossible to read the labeling on many products. This even applies to cooking instructions on ready meals- ( to add insult to injury-cooking instruction are often placed on the bottom of the ready meal pack!)
Ian Macsporran
I was reading “Supermarket packaging tactics exposed” (Which? Sep 2012) when we opened two cans of Tesco plum tomatoes for lunch. One can was the old packaging (Tesco Value) and one was the new (Tesco Everyday Value). Same contents but the calories contained have changed! 34 calories per half-can in the old; 37 calories per half-can in the new. Still “peeled plum tomatoes in tomato juice”!
The translations into foreign languages have disappeared from the label. Old packaging had translations into Polish, Czech, Slovak and Magyar. New packaging has none. As a member of the generation who thought it learned French from HP Sauce labels (“Cette sauce est un melange …”) I miss this. Tomatoes = pomidory (Pol), Rajcata (Cz), Rajcaki (Sk) and Paradicsom (Hun). Ah well!