Psychologist Reveals How Restaurants Manipulate Your Sense of Taste

Why does restaurant food taste so good? It helps that the chefs have had years of culinary training, but the same exact dish would taste subtly different if you ate it from the confines of your own home, and a leading psychologist has told Newsweek why this may be.

Without realizing it, we are being psychologically manipulated everywhere we go—from supermarket layouts to adverts on the subway. And restaurants and cafés are no exception.

Color, smell, sound and lighting can all influence our brain's perception flavor, dramatically altering the way we experience food. These can be specific characteristics of the food itself—such as brightly colored packaging and elaborate names—or they can relate to the environment in which the food is being eaten.

In a recent study, published in the journal Food Quality and Preference, researchers from the University of Campania in Italy set out to investigate how these environmental variables can alter perceptions of the taste of low-sugar orange juice. They found that participants rated the orange juice as being sweeter when they were in environments with warm lighting, red backgrounds and a high-frequency background tone. However, when the participants drank the same orange juice in an environment with cool lighting, a green background and low frequency tone, it was rated as having a "thicker" and more intense aroma.

"The thing that continues to surprise everyone is sonic seasoning, the way you can use music to change the taste of food," Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, told Newsweek.

Spence has extensively studied the influence of sound on taste perception. In a 2017 study for the journal Appetite, Spence and colleagues demonstrated how listening to a smooth, "sweet" soundtrack compared to a "rough" one can significantly influence the listener's experience of chocolate.

"Give people a black coffee with a little sugar, or some dark chocolate, and play sweet or bitter music and the majority of people will say the chocolate with 'sweet' music really tastes sweeter," Spence said.

This so-called "sonic seasoning" has already been put into practice in several restaurants and cafes around the world.

For example, the Xin café in Beijing plays sweet music all day so as to reduce sugar content of their drinks but keep the taste the same, Spence said.

The pitch of this music can also influence how much we eat, according to a study published in 2018, also in the journal Appetite. The researchers found that lower-pitched soundtracks encouraged participants to opt for larger serving sizes and can also increase desire for a food product among hungry customers.

When it comes to volume, loud music has been shown to encourage customers to drink more and may also lead us towards more unhealthy food choices. By contrast, customers often spend more money on food in restaurants with quieter, ambient music and may also opt for healthier foods. Similar results have been seen for tempo, where slower music may encourage customers to linger longer and spend more money.

So, although these psychological tricks may be helpful to restaurants hoping to persuade customers to part with their hard-earned cash, they can also help us to make healthier choices by making food and drinks more palatable without increasing sugar content.