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People expect chocolate to taste more bitter if it is in black packaging, while yellow and pink packaging is associated with sweeter-tasting chocolate.

Iuri Baptista at the University of Campinas in Brazil and his colleagues wanted to investigate how people respond to the colour of chocolate packaging.

The researchers sent a survey to 420 people between the ages of 18 and 60. Half of the participants were in Brazil and the other half were in France. The survey contained two photos of milk chocolate bars and two of dark chocolate bars. Each one came in packaging of a specific colour 鈥� either black, blue, brown, green, red, pink or yellow.

The participants were asked to rank each chocolate bar on a scale of one to nine for different attributes, including how sweet or bitter they expected the chocolate to taste. To avoid any bias, they weren鈥檛 told the purpose of the study.

People expected both milk and dark chocolates to be the least sweet and most bitter if its packaging was black. Conversely, the participants expected the chocolates in yellow or pink packaging to be the sweetest and least bitter.

鈥淭he colour of packaging changes how the consumer expects the chocolate to taste,鈥� says Baptista.

The participants were also asked how much they expected to like each chocolate bar. Milk chocolate was rated as most likely to be enjoyed if it came in black packaging 鈥� but dark chocolate was least likely to be enjoyed when it was placed in exactly the same black packaging.

There was no appreciable difference between the responses of the participants in Brazil and those in France. This surprised the team, considering both countries have very different chocolate-eating habits, says Baptista. On average, a person in France will eat 7.3 kilograms of chocolate per year versus just 2.8 kilograms in Brazil. French people also eat chocolate with a higher cocoa content than Brazilian people.

鈥淐olour plays an important role in setting our expectations,鈥� says Charles Spence at the University of Oxford. 鈥淭hese expectations can then influence the actual taste experience.鈥�

In the future, the researchers hope to test whether chocolate seems to taste different with different-coloured packaging.