Food color plays an important role in attracting consumers from buying the food. This is because, color has the properties of stimulating consumers’ appetite. Consumers will expect that a more intensely coloured foods and beverages will have a more intense taste. According to Spence (2015), through a laboratory test, they found that participant in laboratory research tend to rate the taste or flavor as more intense when adding more colouring to a food. This shows that addition of food colouring can influences sensory threshold for certain of the basic taste. Different color will influence different taste perception. For example, addition of green food colouring can increase people’s detection threshold of sweetness. While the addition of red colouring has the abilities to reduce the threshold for the detection of bitterness (Spence, 2015). When red colouring added to a food, people tend to have a lower bitter taste sensitivity. According to Johnson and Clydesdale (1982), the intensity of red coluring will affects people’s perception of sweetness towards food. The darker the color, participants tend to give a higher rate towards the sweetness of the food. However, salty taste may not be influences by any of the color as salty foods can come in any color and hence people have few direct color associations with saltiness (Mega, 1974). In conclusion, color has the ability to influences people’s taste perception towards food.  

Taste and colours have been found to be associated with each other through various research, where one perceived a particular colour to be associated or reflect with one of the basic taste and vice versa. The outcomes of the research reported that red and pink are often associated with sweet taste, white and blue with salty taste, green and yellow with sour taste and browny-black and purple with bitter taste. Through the findings of these research, new ideas for creation of menu items and food products has been done. In terms of menu items, in 2015, Jozef Youssef, a chef serves amuse bouche, which is a single, bite size hors d’evoure at Maida Vale, London. The dish was simply named “sweet, sour, salty and bitter”, consisting of four amuse bouche in a single dish, which requires dining guest to guess which taste belongs to which colour (as each amuse bouche is of different colour from each other). Later on, another chef, Xavier Gomen also serve another version of the amuse bouche in Porto Allegre, Brazil. Furthermore, the spice company, Schwartz also implement abstract use of colour in interpreting product’s flavour through an advertisement. The use exploding bags of colour (-ed spices) for their flavour pod range.

Taste and colours have been found to be associated with each other through various research, where one perceived a particular colour to be associated or reflect with one of the basic taste and vice versa. The outcomes of the research reported that red and pink are often associated with sweet taste, white and blue with salty taste, green and yellow with sour taste and browny-black and purple with bitter taste. Through the findings of these research, new ideas for creation of menu items and food products has been done. In terms of menu items, in 2015, Jozef Youssef, a chef serves amuse bouche, which is a single, bite size hors d’evoure at Maida Vale, London. The dish was simply named “sweet, sour, salty and bitter”, consisting of four amuse bouche in a single dish, which requires dining guest to guess which taste belongs to which colour (as each amuse bouche is of different colour from each other). Later on, another chef, Xavier Gomen also serve another version of the amuse bouche in Porto Allegre, Brazil. Furthermore, the spice company, Schwartz also implement abstract use of colour in interpreting product’s flavour through an advertisement. They use exploding bags of colour (-ed spices) for their flavour pod range.

Traditionally, the mapping of colour onto taste, or vice versa, has been based on the intuitions of the creative or designer involved, or else on the crossmodal associations apparently experienced by a few synaesthetes for whom the experience of taste comes with a conscious experience of colour.
For instance, the colour red, which is commonly associated with sweetness, is not just characteristic of sweet ingredients (think here only of red meat, or red chili) and it is not obvious that sweetness is more often present in red foodstuffs than yellow, white, brown, or orange foods. This aspect of the correspondences between colours and tastes makes them intriguingly different.