YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT: HOW FOOD TEXTURE AND PACKAGING INFLUENCE CONSUMER WELL-BEING

Abstract

This two-essay dissertation explores how sensory aspects of consumption (e.g., food packaging and food texture) influence consumer well-being. Consumers make more than 200 decisions about food every day (HealthDay 2007). Thus, it is of great importance to understand consumers’ relationships with foods (Block 2013). Essay 1 is the first research, to the best of my knowledge, to demonstrate packaging gloss biases consumers’ healthfulness perceptions and, as a result, food preference, choice, and consumption. Nine experiments, including a field experiment, show that people have learned to associate glossy surfaces on snack food packages with unhealthy products, whereas matte surfaces signal with healthier products. We further demonstrate that such associations are due to sensation transference triggered by packaging gloss and are especially true for restrained eaters, who are more sensitive to food healthfulness cues (e.g., Irmak, Vallen, and Rozin 2011). Essay 2 examines the effect of food textures (e.g., crunchy versus chewy) on consumers’ psychological arousal levels. Results from four experiments and a field experiment show that chewing crunchy (versus chewy) foods lead to increased physiological arousal levels, and consumers strategically choose foods as a function of different textures (e.g., crunchy or chewy) to regulate their physiological arousal levels. Specifically, when people want to feel more awake and energetic, they are more likely to choose crunchy snacks over chewy snacks, whereas when they want to feel calmer and more relaxed, they are more likely to opt for chewy snacks. The results of both essays demonstrate the noticeable effects that sensory aspects of consumption (e.g., food packaging and food texture) have on consumers’ biological and psychological welfare.