Food packaging cues influence children's taste perception

Food packaging cues influence taste perception and increase effort provision for a recommended snack product for children, said a study led by scientists from the University of Bonn on Wednesday.

Children tend to purchase snacks particularly when the package is attractively designed. However, German scientists found out that if the food packaging is laid out attractively, primary school children would also access to healthy food.

"The candy industry has a lot of experience with how to increase marketing effects of product sales by children," said Prof. Bernd Weber of the Center for Economics and Neuroscience (CENs) of the University of Bonn.

"Comparatively, there are only few insights on how to use such marketing effects for healthy foods," said Weber.

The study investigated the effects of packaging cues on explicit preferences and effort provision for healthy food items in elementary school children.

Each of 179 children rated three, objectively identical, recommended yoghurt-cereal-fruit snacks presented with different packaging cues.

Packaging cues included a plain label, a label focusing on health aspects of the product, and a label that additionally included unknown cartoon characters. The children were asked to state the subjective taste-pleasantness of the respective food items.

The results showed that packaging cues significantly induce a taste-placebo effect in 88 percent of the children, and confirmed the positive effect of child-directed marketing strategies also for healthy snack food products.

"Attractively designed food packaging can tempt children into unhealthy foods. Such marketing effects can however be also used to win over the offspring for healthy food," said Prof. Kersting from the Research Institute of Child Nutrition Dortmund.

The results are published in advance online in the journal "Frontiers in Psychology". Endit