People choose smaller food portions if they focus on pleasure of eating – study
People can be encouraged to choose smaller, healthier food portions when they focus on the multisensory pleasure (taste, smell, texture) brought about by the food, according to a new research from INSEAD, a graduate business school with campuses in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia (UBC Sauder) in Canada.
Pierre Chandon, the L’Oréal Chaired Professor of Marketing, Innovation and Creativity at INSEAD and Yann Cornil, Assistant Professor of the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia (UBC Sauder), found that when people focus on the pleasure of food, they tend to choose smaller portions. This is because pleasure is inversely related to size when it comes to eating.
Pleasure in eating is experienced in its maximum in the first few bites of the food. Each additional bite becomes then less enjoyable and it is the last bite which determines the overall impression of how much we enjoyed the food.
When people choose portions based on value for money, or the fear of being hungry, they end up choosing one of today’s supersized portions which are just not that enjoyable to eat toward the end. This rapid increase in portion sizes has gone hand in hand with the rising rates of obesity all over the world.
Governments and public health institutions have advocated portion size limits and health warnings, but they have had limited success, as consumers and food marketers feel they are both on the losing end of the campaign.
Cornil and Chandon’s research also show that unlike health warnings, this multisensory imagery does not reduce expected eating enjoyment or willingness to pay for the food. In fact, “focusing on the pleasure of eating, rather than value for money, health, or hunger, makes people happier to pay more for less food,” said Chandon.
Cornil and Chandon conducted five different experiments using different groups such as French schoolchildren, adult Americans and young Parisian women.
In the first study, 42 French schoolchildren were asked to incorporate their five senses in imagining the pleasure of eating desserts and were then asked to choose portions of brownies. They chose brownies that were two sizes smaller than portions chosen by children in the control condition.
In another experiment, Cornil and Chandon imitated high end restaurants by providing vivid descriptions of a regular chocolate cake, which resulted in 190 adult Americans choosing a smaller portion compared to a control condition where the cake was simply described as “chocolate cake”.
In the same experiment, people were also told about the calorie and fat content of each cake portion. However, the added nutrition information also reduced the amount that people were to pay for the cake. They chose smaller portions but were willing to pay about US$1 less for it.
In the third study, people underestimated how much they will enjoy eating small portions of chocolate brownies, as they expected to enjoy small portions less than larger ones, when actually both were enjoyed equally.
“Having more descriptive menus or product labels that encourage customers to use their senses can lead to positive outcomes for consumer satisfaction and health, but also for profits,” said Cornil. “This could make for a more sustainable food industry, which struggles to grow in the face of today’s obesity epidemic.”
The study was based on Cornil’s PhD dissertation which was conducted at INSEAD under the mentorship of Chandon who is also the director of the INSEAD Sorbonne University Behavioral Lab.
