Tag Archives: Taste

Cases

Food tastes different at rooftop bar

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Vertigo offers a Bangkok’s ultimate rooftop dining experience. Sixty one floors above the city, people dine on premium steaks while feasting eyes on the skyline. When I visited this rooftop terrace, it was neither windy nor noisy, a perfect place to enjoy dish under the completely dark black sky.

 

 

However, food they served had very little flavor to me. It surprised me because Thai is one of my favorite cuisines. At first, I suspected that I over-enjoyed the street food that had been heavily seasoned with basil, garlic, ginger, and red chili. Alternatively, the level of spiciness and flavor might have been calibrated for cautious people.

 

 

However, I also thought food might taste different at high altitude as in-flight meals are dull and unpleasant. Katia Moskvitch wrote an article about why food tastes different on planes.

… as the plane gets higher, the air pressure drops while humidity levels in the cabin plummet. At about 30,000 feet, humidity is less than 12% – drier than most deserts. The combination of dryness and low pressure reduces the sensitivity of your taste buds to sweet and salty foods by around 30%…

 

 

 

Cases

Blue iced tea is popular

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Color determines food judgment. According to Hoegg and Alba (2007), for instance, the brightness of an orange juice affects people’s taste discrimination more strongly than its brand name (e.g., Tropicana or Winn-Dixie) or its price information. Food judgment is probably influenced by the hue and saturation of the food as well.

Recently, I find some stores selling blue-colored iced tea. This unexpected color may attract significant attention among those who do not drink teas or who is visually attentive such as kids. However, most adults around me infer it as a poor-quality fake beverage because, they believe, tea is supposed to be orange rust or brown regardless of its temperature. This suggests that changing the color of a given product enables designers and marketers to pursue a new market by sacrificing their traditional market.

Surprisingly, there exists a green wine called Vinho Verde in the world! 🙂

20130731_Ice tea @ Seoul

Hoegg, JoAndrea and Joseph W. Alba (2007), “Taste Perception: More than Meets the Tongue,” Journal of Consumer Research, 33 (4), 490–98.

Perceptual discrimination is fundamental to rational choice in many product categories yet rarely examined in consumer research. The present research investigates discrimination as it pertains to consumers’ ability to identify differences—or the lack thereof—among gustatory stimuli. Three experiments reveal systematic bias resulting from the presence of common visual and verbal product cues. Particularly noteworthy is the finding that the amount of bias induced by a subtle, nonevaluative cue can far exceed the bias induced by overt and well‐established evaluative cues. In addition, the effects these cues have on perceptual discrimination diverge from the effects they have on preference.