Practicing the (un)healthy = tasty intuition: Toward an ecological view of the relationship between health and taste in consumer judgments

Fifty shades of food: The influence of package color saturation on health and taste in consumer judgments

“…This paper has three main objectives. First, we replicated previous research findings (Haasova & Florack, ), showing a positive relationship between consumers' evaluation of healthiness and tastiness of food products. Second, as we argue that this relationship is formed by overlapping cues for healthiness and tastiness, we tested how removing a relevant cue, that is, color affects this relationship.…”

“…Taken together, we have reason to believe that the same visual cues on product packages help to assess a food's healthiness as well as tastiness, thus contributing to the positive healthiness–tastiness relationship. Based on these arguments as well as on previous findings (Haasova & Florack, ; Luomala et al, ; Werle et al, ), we hypothesized:…”

“…Past studies proposed that consumers often apply an unhealthy = tasty heuristic in food perception (Liem et al, ; Raghunathan et al, ), meaning that they tend to think that unhealthy food tastes better than healthy food and vice versa. In contrast, more recent work (Haasova & Florack, ; Landry et al, ; Luomala et al, ; Werle et al, ) showed that people rather see healthy food as tastier in comparison to unhealthy food and vice versa. One possible explanation for this association between healthiness and tastiness is that consumers use partly the same product cues to assess its healthiness and tastiness.…”

“…On the one hand, research findings indicated that consumers follow an unhealthy = tasty intuition, that is, they believe unhealthy food to taste better than healthy food (Liem, Toraman Aydin, & Zandstra, ; Raghunathan, Naylor, & Hoyer, ). In contrast, more recent findings indicated an opposing healthy = tasty view in consumers (Haasova & Florack, ; Landry et al, ; Luomala et al, ; Werle, Trendel, & Ardito, ). We believe that the healthy = tasty view is predominant in consumers because we think that the same cues on product packages can indicate health and taste to consumers.…”

Valuable Food Molecules with Potential Benefits for Human Health

“…At the same time, attributes such as food palatability and healthiness are key elements in the consumer choices [28]. A recent research of Haasova and Florac has shown that manufactures need to focus on increasing the consumers' orientation toward health goals and on reducing the consumers' beliefs that healthy food equals tasteless food [29]. In another study, conducted in 2019 in the U.S., focused on consumers' perceptions on natural and healthy foods, it was shown that consumers buy food products according to the several factors such as taste, price, healthiness, safety, and naturalness.…”