Food Psychology for Food Design

Dr. Francesca Zampollo

First of all…

What is Food Design?Food Design is the design process that leads to innovation on products, services, or systems for food and eating: from production, procurement, preservation, and transportation, to preparation, presentation, consumption, and disposal

What is Food Psychology?Food Psychology is a term coined by Professor Brian Wansink. It is the discipline that answers the questions: Why do we eat as much as we eat? Why do we eat what we eat? Why do we eat how we eat? It looks at the relationship between humans and food from a psychological and sometimes sociological perspective. It looks at how human beings behave around food, think about food, and sometimes don’t think about food, looking at all the unconscious things we do but that we’re not aware of

Which means that Food Psychology is a great

resource for food designers!

For a FREE email course on Food Design check out: http://onlineschooloffooddesign.org/p/food-design-101

At the beginning of the design process, designers start looking around. This is where they try and understand their design context and target users. The goal is to search for existing information, before gathering additional complementary information.

Whatever the design project, there is information within food psychology that a food designer would need and that they would find very useful in their design process.

To demonstrate this, I am going to give you three examples from three of my favorite articles published by Professor Wansink, just to give you a taste of how little we know about ourselves when it comes to food, and therefore, how many wrong assumptions food designers can make!

And this is the point, because assumptions are a designer’s worst enemy, and overcoming them is the reason why preliminary research is conducted.

Okay, article number one: Descriptive menu labels' effect on sales. In this study Professor Wansink went into a faculty cafeteria and changed the names of the dishes on the menu. For six weeks two items had regular names and two items had new names, a “descriptive label”, as he puts it. The new names went from Grilled Chicken to Tender Grilled Chicken, from Seafood Fillet to Succulent Italian Seafood Filet. They let people choose their food and then they gave them a questionnaire.

What did they learn? • the item with the fancy name, no surprise

there. • the items with the descriptive label were

considered as having higher quality and higher value.

• they improved the attitude towards the entire establishment and influenced people’s purchase intention, saying they would eat it again!

All of this just because the name of the dish had fancier words or more adjectives!

What is also great about this article is that at the end, there is an appendix that gives suggestions on how to improve the names of dishes. So food designers, restaurant managers, and chefs, take note!

• Use geographic labels, which refer to the place where flavors come from. E.g.: Southwestern Tex-Mex Salad, and Country Peach Tart.

• Use nostalgia labels alluding to past times to trigger happy memories of family, tradition, and nationalism. E.g.: Nana’s Favorite Chicken Soup, and Legendary Chocolate Mousse Pie

• Use sensory labels that accurately describe the taste, smell, and mouth feel of the menu item. E.g.: Hearty Wholesome Steaks, and Snappy Seasonal Carrots.

• Use brand labels that involve a cross-promotion with a related brand that has important associations. E.g.: Jack Daniels BBQ Ribs, and Butterfinger Blizzard.

Article number two: Environmental factors that increase the food intake and consumption volume of unknowing consumers. This is a spectacular, huge literature review article in which Professor Wansink shows how the eating environment (atmosphere, eating effort, socialisation, distractions, etc.) and the food environment (variety, size of package and portions, stockpiling of food, shape of food vessel, etc.) influence consumption volume. Basically, what and how much we eat is mostly subconscious and we don’t realise it!

Article number three: Bad popcorn in big buckets. I kept the best for last. Professor Wansink asked himself: What would happen if I gave people food when they were not hungry and food that wasn’t any good? So he set an experiment in a movie theatre, and to people who had dinner before going into the movie theatre, he gave big buckets of popcorn… five-day-old, stale popcorn! Now… when people eat good popcorn during a movie, they eat, eat, and eat. When people eat nasty, stale popcorn, they get a bite, make a face of disgust, and put it down. Three minutes later they turn around, and, “Hey! Popcorn!” And eat again. And so on and so forth for the duration of the movie. At the end of the movie, they ate 25% more popcorn! This proves that we don’t know how much we eat… even when the food is bad!

This was just a hint of Food Psychology for you, just a little sprinkle of information. As a food designer you must be aware of behavioural and psychological aspects of people around food. Hope this has inspired you to make this prolific discipline one of your sources of information for your research in future food design projects.

Happy Food Design!

For a FREE email course on Food Design check out: http://onlineschooloffooddesign.org/p/food-design-101

Read the entire article on the Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/dr-francesca-zampollo

Interested in Food Design?

Check out the Online School of Food

Designhttp://onlineschooloffooddesign.org/

Or my YouTube Channelhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyZRNHlh4BjYTfCyr4sgh1Q

For a FREE email course on Food Design check out: http://onlineschooloffooddesign.org/p/food-design-101

References:

Wansink, B. (2004). Environmental factors that increase the food intake and consumption volume of unknowing consumers. Annual Review of Nutrition, 24, 455-479.

Wansink, B., & Kim, J. (2005). Bad popcorn in big buckets: portion size can influence intake as much as taste. Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, 37(5), 242-245.

Wansink, B., Painter, J., & Ittersum, K. v. (2001). Descriptive menu labels' effect on sales. Cornell hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, 42(6), 68-72.