You may not realise, but colours have a huge impact on not only our appetites but how we experience taste. You’ll notice that fast food chains often feature the colours red and yellow; these colours are known to increase appetite, increasing the likelihood of you stopping to make a purchase.
Colour also affects the way we experience our sense of taste. If you closed your eyes and tasted a bag of jelly beans, do you think you could pick every flavour? Can you pick them more accurately when you see what colour they are before they go into your mouth?
We had a colour conflict recently in the chocolate kitchen. We import our raw chocolate from Belgium and then temper it here in our kitchen. We had ordered a special lemon flavoured chocolate but when the lemon is added to the chocolate it causes the chocolate to actually turn green.
Once we had processed the chocolate and were taking our first taste tests, there was some disagreement between those of us with 20/20 vision and Gerrard. When Heather tasted the chocolate, influenced by the colour, she was convinced it tasted like lime. Without being able to see the green tinge to the chocolate, Gerrard was able to accurately identify the lemon flavour instantly.
Apparently, the colour had caused confusion with chocolatiers around the world and the supplier actually changed the name of the flavour to lemon/lime. Committed to taste, as the most important sense in chocolate making, Gerrard was not happy to learn that the flavour was being inaccurately named to compensate for this taste/colour disconnect and actually convinced the supplier to change the name back to lemon.
Chocolate Moments was created because Gerrard was tired of eating uninspiring chocolates whose flavour couldn’t be detected without reading the packaging, and wanted to create a treat that could be experienced without having to rely on vision. For this reason, it is critical to him that taste does the talking, and that no one is making concessions for this sneaky trick that colour plays on our brains.
So, close your eyes, pop a Chocolate Moments morsel in your mouth and let taste prevail!