When Color Meets Health: The Impact of Package Colors on the Perception of Food Healthiness and Purchase Intention

The rising obesity epidemic (Flegal, Carroll, Kit, and Ogden 2012) arouses consumers’ healthy eating concerns and motivates food manufactures to improve the nutritional content of their products towards a healthier direction. In a real-life grocery shopping situation, however, consumers often lack time or motivation to search and process detailed nutrition information to support their judgment and purchase decision (Wansink and Sobal 2007). Thus, visual cues, such as color, become critically influential because processing this type of information requires little cognitive resource. Although substantial research has been given to food color (e.g., Stillman 1993, Christensen 1985), the package color, as influential visual information on food decision making, is overlooked. This research aims to explore the effect of package color on consumer’s perception and behavioral intention on contained food. We expect that food in blue package is perceived healthier and hence associated with a higher purchase intention than in red package. Furthermore, in the present research foods are categorized as utilitarian or hedonic products based on the major motives behind their consumption. The consumption of utilitarian foods is driven by their functions (Dhar and Wertenbroch 2000), such as quest hunger or reduce diseases risks, whereas the desire to eat hedonic foods is mainly driven by the anticipated hedonic experience of eating, such as the palatability of foods (Benforado, Hanson, and Yosifon 2004). Empirical findings revealed that hedonic foods may not be intuitively perceived as healthy as utilitarian foods because sensory pleasure often are associated with sweet, salty, and fatty hedonic foods (Assanand, Pinel, and Lehman 1998, Wertenbroch 1998). Therefore, we expect that compared to utilitarian foods, the potential influence of package color on consumer’s perception of food healthiness should be less salience for hedonic foods since they have already been intuitively perceived as unhealthy.