Looking Versus Tasting: Sensory Mode of Evaluation Influences Food Healthiness Perception

Food healthiness is often an important factor in deciding what to eat and how much. When evaluating healthiness, individuals may have access to only visual information, such as when they see food on display at a store/restaurant or see a food image on a package, menu, or store/restaurant website. However, in other contexts, individuals may have access to multisensory information through product sampling (e.g., grocery stores, food courts). Would sensory mode of evaluation, and specifically eating a food versus only viewing it, differentially influence perceived healthiness? Four preregistered studies address this question. The results show that individuals perceive foods with a combination of flavors/ingredients as healthier when they sample (vs. only view) them. Process evidence suggests the effect may be driven by salience of added flavors/ingredients when evaluating food based only on visual information (vs. sampling). Accordingly, highlighting the added flavor reduces healthiness of sampled foods to attenuate the effect. The effect also attenuates when foods do not have a combination of flavors/ingredients and could therefore be evaluated based on stereotypical healthy/unhealthy categorizations. The findings have implications for consumers, managers, and regulators. They also underscore the need for research investigating how information from different sensory modalities influences product evaluations, and the need for work identifying the mechanisms driving sensory integration.