An exploratory study using graphic design to communicate consumer benefits on food packaging

Commercial food packages may contain multiple messages. Packaging designers try to integrate all messages into a coherent design. Designers may use text, images or stylistic features, but these mediums may differ in their suitability to communicate specific product benefits. To evaluate the usefulness and effectiveness of these three mediums,...

Setting the Stage: Disgust as an Aesthetic Food Experience

Disgust is commonly understood as an emotion of aversion. However, people seem to eat certain food items not despite containing disgust eliciting features but because of them. In this paper, we introduce the term aesthetic disgust to capture this phenomenon. We outline in our manuscript how designers use different techniques to stage the food...

Bringing disgust in through the backdoor in healthy food promotion: a phenomenological perspective

Obesity has been pointed out as one of the main current health risks leading to calls for a so-called “war on obesity”. As we show in this paper, activities that attempt to counter obesity by persuading people to adjust a specific behavior often employ a pedagogy of regret and disgust. Nowadays, however, public healthcare campaigns that aim to...

Conveying information through food packaging: A literature review comparing legislation with consumer perception

Although governments have implemented regulations to inform consumers on important product properties and protect consumers from deceptive information, empirical research on how consumers perceive, interpret and experience food packages have shown frequently that consumers may be misled by how information is presented and packages are...