What Color is Your Hot Chocolate?

We all know color can impact our mood but did you realize it influenced your tastebuds?

Study conducted by the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain determines that the color of tableware influences the way we perceive our food.

• A creamsicle-colored set of mugs will make your hot chocolate taste and smell sweeter than it would taste served in plain white or stark red, according to European scientists.
• This adds to the growing set of studies that claim the vessel in which our food is served can have a dramatic effect on the way our senses perceive the food.
• In what may have been the easiest volunteer experiment ever, 57 people had to drink hot chocolate served in four different types of cups.
• They were all plastic and the same size, but were either white, cream, red or orange with white inside.
• The tasters reported the chocolate tasted better in the cream-colored and orange cups.
• The color had nothing to do with this difference, neither physically nor chemically, but apparently the drinkers’ brains thought they detected a difference, according to Betina Piqueras-Fiszman, a researcher at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain.
• The study references other similar findings–like the perception that yellow packaging improves lemon flavor, or that blue drinks appear to be more thirst-quenching than red ones.

Mmm…sweet!

Now think about your clients. Color impacts customers. How are they perceiving you and what you have to say to them about your products or services? Are you trying to communicate with your customers via quick and easy, down and dirty, black and white correspondence? Are you including exciting graphics and highlighting key points in a bright, eye-catching color?

How about your employees? Do they see what you want them to see and do they remember what you want them to remember? Approximately 65% of the population are visual learners. Use graphical information to your advantage and don’t underestimate the value of color to create sweeter hot chocolate!