Promoting healthy food choice with a visual cue The influence of manipulating simulation with a visual product extrinsic cue on sensory evaluation and liking of a food product.

Abstract

Moving consumers towards the choice of healthier reformulated food is challenging, as reformulated food and even reduced-salt labels generate a negative taste expectation and experience. However, it is known that if consumers merely perceive a visual of a food item, this can trigger simulations of consuming it, resulting into certain behaviour intentions and attitudes. Adopting a grounded cognition perspective, we suggest that showing a visual cue, congruent to the situated eating context of a food product (soup in a kitchen) leads to more simulation of the soup consumption experience, more salivation, more liking and a different sensory evaluation, compared to showing a visual cue, incongruent to the situated eating context (soup in a cinema). These hypotheses were tested in a between-subjects design with three conditions. In an experiment, simulation was manipulated by a visual cue (congruent, incongruent or control) and a tasting session was executed. As expected, a congruent visual leads to more simulation on aspects directly related to the food product itself, an increase in the amount of salivation, increased desire to eat the product and the expectation to like the product more, than an incongruent visual. Surprisingly, results do not indicate any direct or indirect effect (mediated by simulation) of congruence on liking of the food product or the sensory evaluation. These findings suggest that using simple unconscious visual cues can facilitate the choice of healthy food, but more research is needed on how these cues can also influence the taste experience itself.