Snack packaging psychology, explained:
- Packaging can influence expectations around taste, texture, healthiness and indulgence before consumers have even opened the product.
- Colour, shape and other design cues can create sensory expectations that either reinforce the formulation or leave the product struggling to deliver what the pack promised.
- Bringing R&D, sensory and packaging teams together earlier could help manufacturers ensure the experience consumers anticipate on shelf matches what they encounter in the first bite.
Your new snack may have taken 18 months to formulate, survived countless factory trials and emerged with exactly the crunch, flavour and nutritional profile the brief demanded. The shopper standing in front of it, however, knows none of that. They’re looking at a crowded shelf and deciding whether your pack deserves their attention.
Marketers have long called this the ‘First Moment of Truth’. The term, coined by Procter & Gamble in 2005, describes the few seconds in which a shopper encounters a product at retail and forms an initial judgement. It’s often put at around three to five seconds, while other interpretations stretch the window closer to seven. The precise stopwatch reading is less important than the commercial reality – packaging has remarkably little time to explain what months of product development have created.
Yet packaging is doing something considerably more interesting than simply fighting for attention. A growing body of sensory research suggests colour, shape, typography, imagery, weight and other design cues can create expectations about sweetness, bitterness, intensity, healthiness, premium quality and even texture. Those expectations can influence the experience when the food finally reaches the mouth.
R&D may make the product, but packaging has started telling the consumer what that product should taste like before it reaches their mouth. Product development, in other words, doesn’t necessarily end when the formulation is signed off.
Your pack is making promises you didn’t write on it
Put ‘extra crunchy’, ‘dark chocolate’ or ‘sea salt’ on a pack and the communication is explicit. Make the pack angular, rounded, red, green, matt, glossy, heavy or lightweight and the signals become less obvious, but consumers can still interpret them.
Prof Charles Spence, an experimental psychologist at the University of Oxford, has spent years investigating these crossmodal correspondences – the associations our brains make between apparently unrelated sensory cues. His research has repeatedly found associations between shapes and tastes, with rounded forms tending to be associated with sweetness and angular forms more readily connected with bitterness, sourness and carbonation.
Colour can be even more powerful. In a 2018 review published in Food Quality and Preference, Spence and Carlos Velasco described colour as “perhaps the single most important element” in multisensory packaging design.
“Packaging colour, then, plays a dominant role at several stages of the consumer’s product experience,” wrote the authors. Their review found that colour can do far more than attract attention and reinforce brand recognition, with packaging used to communicate expected taste and flavour as well as more abstract qualities such as premium, natural or healthy. Research also suggests those expectations can, under certain circumstances, influence the subsequent experience of consuming the product.
That puts considerably more weight on what might otherwise look like a routine design decision. A biscuit could be technically sweeter, crunchier or more indulgent than its predecessor, but packaging dominated by cues associated with health, restraint or naturalness may prime consumers for a very different eating experience. Equally, an aggressively indulgent pack wrapped around a product reformulated with less sugar or fat could promise a sensory hit that the recipe struggles to deliver.
Packaging and formulation therefore shouldn’t be treated as entirely separate conversations. Research has found that multiple visual cues can combine to establish expectations around tastes such as sweetness and sourness, while conflicting cues can complicate the message consumers receive.
The lesson isn’t that every sweet biscuit needs rounded pink packaging or every dark chocolate bar should come covered in sharp angles. Brand assets, category conventions, culture and previous experience all affect how consumers interpret design. Manufacturers do, however, need to consider whether the pack is inadvertently telling a different sensory story from the product inside it.
When the health halo changes the expected taste
This becomes particularly complicated as snacks attempt to communicate health and indulgence at the same time.
Protein, fibre, wholegrains, gut health, reduced sugar and natural ingredients are competing for attention alongside gooey chocolate, crunch, creaminess, buttery pastry and all the other cues that tell consumers a product will be pleasurable. Packaging increasingly has to reconcile both sides of that equation without making either proposition unbelievable.
Research has demonstrated that packaging colour can prime expectations around attributes including healthiness, naturalness and sensory intensity, although these associations aren’t universal rules. Meanings can vary substantially between products, categories, cultures and individual consumers.
Snack-specific research shows just how nuanced those associations can become. A 2025 study by Maggie Fung, Jasmine Zhang and Kara Chan at Hong Kong Baptist University tested consumer responses to blue, green, red and yellow snack packaging across 2,036 observations. Blue and green were associated with greater perceived healthiness among people with high restrained-eating behaviours, while red and yellow increased perceived tastiness among those with high external-eating behaviours.
“Packaging colour plays a crucial role in consumer communication and significantly influences purchase decisions,” wrote the authors, adding that consumers often rely on peripheral cues and have limited attention when selecting snacks. Their findings also showed that perceptions of healthiness were positively related to purchase decisions.
That creates a potential trap for better-for-you snacks. Make a high-fibre cookie look too virtuous and shoppers may expect an eating experience that’s worthy rather than delicious. Push indulgence too aggressively and its nutritional credentials could become harder to communicate. Fill every available centimetre with protein, fibre, low-sugar, plant-based and functional claims and those precious few seconds of attention at the shelf risk becoming a reading exercise.
The influence isn’t confined to the wrapper either. In a 2017 study published in Flavour, Qian Janice Wang, Felipe Reinoso Carvalho, Dominique Persoone and Spence gave participants two identical dark chocolates that differed only in shape – one round and the other angular. Participants were asked to rate their expectations of sweetness, bitterness, creaminess and liking before tasting them.
“Shape can play an important role in our perception of food,” wrote the authors. The study found that shape affected expectations before consumption, although importantly it had no significant effect on the participants’ post-tasting ratings. The differences between what consumers expected and subsequently experienced led the researchers to explore assimilation and contrast as a possible mechanism linking visual expectations and sensory experience.
This is why manufacturers should be wary of simplistic colour and shape psychology. Red doesn’t automatically make something delicious; green isn’t a magic button for health; and rounded typography won’t necessarily convince somebody that a biscuit is sweeter.
A more useful concept is congruence – whether the sensory expectations created by brand names, packaging, shapes and other external cues correspond with what consumers subsequently encounter. If the pack promises an experience that the product can’t satisfy, clever design may simply make the eventual disappointment more pronounced.
Stop leaving the pack until the product is finished
Food companies divide responsibilities between R&D, operations, regulatory, marketing and design for perfectly sensible reasons, but sensory research suggests those conversations need to overlap much earlier.
Consider a cracker developed specifically around an intense crunch but wrapped in packaging that communicates softness and gentle naturalness, or an indulgent brownie whose restrained wellness aesthetic encourages consumers to expect compromise. Neither approach automatically condemns the product, but each potentially creates an expectation that the food then has to overcome.
Packaging deserves particular attention because it’s one of the few parts of a food product that reaches the consumer before the food does. The recipe can’t persuade somebody to lift the pack from the shelf because they haven’t tasted it yet, while the crunch can’t communicate freshness from inside a sealed bag and the chocolate can’t demonstrate its melt.
The pack has to sell those experiences by proxy, which means packaging research should arguably ask more than whether consumers like a design, recognise the brand or understand its claims. Manufacturers could also investigate what people expect the product inside to taste and feel like before allowing them anywhere near it.
Showing consumers the proposed pack before the tasting and asking how sweet, salty, crunchy, creamy, rich, fresh, light or indulgent they expect the product to be could expose discrepancies that conventional packaging research misses. Developers could then compare those expectations with the actual sensory experience.
Comparing the two could expose problems that neither conventional packaging research nor sensory testing identifies alone. A technically excellent biscuit may disappoint because its packaging promised something even more indulgent, while a reduced-sugar snack might perform better when the pack sets an expectation the reformulated product can realistically meet.
This also changes the role of packaging in renovation projects. When manufacturers reformulate a familiar product, preserving the old pack may maintain recognition but also preserve sensory expectations established by the previous recipe. Redesigning it too dramatically carries the opposite danger by signalling that the product consumers know has changed more than it actually has.
The formulation ultimately determines what the consumer eats, but packaging can influence what they expect that experience to be before the first bite.
Manufacturers spend extraordinary amounts of time ensuring products deliver against technical and sensory briefs, but consumers never see those documents. The packaging effectively writes another brief in their heads before they’ve even torn it open.
If what the pack promises and what the first bite delivers don’t agree, those few seconds at the supermarket shelf may have sold the product once – but they could make selling it a second time considerably harder.
Studies:
Spence C and Valesco C. On the multiple effects of packaging colour on consumer behaviour and product experience in the ‘food and beverage’ and ‘home and personal care’ categories, Food Quality and Preference, Volume 68, 2018, Pages 226-237, ISSN 0950-3293, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2018.03.008.
Fung MSK, Zhang J and Chan K. Impact of Snack Packaging Colour on Perceptions of Healthiness and Tastiness. Sian Journal of Business Research, Vol 15, Issue 2, 2025. https://doi.org/10.14707/ajbr.240197
Wang QJ, Reinoso Carvalho F, Persoone D, et al. Assessing the effect of shape on the evaluation of expected and actual chocolate flavour. Flavour 6, 2 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13411-017-0052-1
