Influencing consumption behaviour through food packaging design

Influencing consumption behaviour through food packaging design: A research on the design aspects of packaging

Berghuijs, E.F.

Schoormans, J.P.L. (mentor)
Cankurtaran, P. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Product Innovation Management

2016-05-31

Everybody has experienced it: you start eating from a pack of biscuits or other snacks and suddenly the pack is empty. Even though you did not intent to eat all of it in once. It is known that the package and the food it contains can make a consumer eat more, but little is known of the opposite. This graduation report (hereafter: study) is a part of the master ‘Strategic Product Design` and tries to answer the question: ‘Can we, (designers) make a snack package that influences the consumer in such a way that they eat less of the snack?’ This graduation research builds upon the literature about packaging. The existing literature is based on either the psychology or on the marketing perspective of packaging. This study targets packaging and consumption behaviour from the point of view of the designer. How is design influencing the behaviour of consumers? It is already known that packaging influences the consumption behaviour. Material, shape, size and eating habits are all studied. However not much is known about how these different design aspects are related to each other. Consumers are more and more aware of the effect of packaging, they know the package influences them to use more of its content. And that the goods inside are also influencing the usage frequency. This study tries to show that it is possible to design a package with which the consumer can self-control the amount of food used. In other words: the designer can give the tools to the consumer to self-control the amount of food that is used. A cover story was used to recruit participants for the study. Participants where told that the study was about emotion recognition software and that it therefore was required to watch a film, while their facial expressions where recorded. All participants were told they could eat and drink during the film. To study the effect of packaging, we specifically designed a package for the purpose of this study and produced it using rapid prototyping. The goal for the package design was to enhance the self-reflectiveness of the consumers. This self-reflectiveness was enhanced by making use of the monitoring effect and the Delboeuf illusion. With the self-reflectiveness of the consumer a more mindful way of eating is possibly reached. Three conditions were tested using a between groups design; One partitioned bowl, one partitioned bowl with a lid and one control bowl without partitions or lid. In total 64 participants where recruited. 22 of them were placed in the control group, 21 in each of the other groups. During a 30 minute film the participants were allowed to eat and drink as much as they wanted. A sweet snack was chosen that was easy to count and put into the different partitions. After the film there was a short questionnaire. The recordings made during the experiments were coded afterwards, looking specifically at the participants eating behaviour. Together with the answers of the questionnaire a data set was produced for the analysis. The hypotheses tested stated that both the partitioning of a bowl and closing the bowl with a lid would reduce the rate of eating and the amount eaten from the bowl. An indication towards rejecting the hypotheses was found. The package, designed according to the guidelines found in earlier literature, did enhance the opposite of what was expected. Participants eating from the package that was thought to be the package that reduces the rate of consumption the most, was in fact enhancing the rate in which the participants where eating from it. More research is needed to be able to speak of significant effects.

design
consumption behaviour
packaging

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:fe6d87cf-0ec5-4908-9c9a-35007eb160c3

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2016 Berghuijs, E.F.