Which colours will arouse your customers?

From the walls to napkins, the colours a business chooses to put in front of a customer will either arouse them or flatten the mood of a dining-out experience, according to the study.

A panel of diners had their brainwaves and heart rates measured in a controlled experiment by hygienic products company Tork, to see how colour can impact dining experiences.

Each person had to spend five minutes in one of eight different coloured rooms while consuming food and drink of the same colour as the room.

Matching colours 'doubles sales'

The information was then fed into a database to determine how each colour impacted a person’s mood and consumption patterns.

Jamie Wright, UK and Ireland communications manager for Tork, explained: “Colours affect dining experiences and businesses should know how this can affect them.”

Matching different tableware to different environments and different times of the day could help boost sales.

Meanwhile, experts previously told the Publican’s Morning Advertiser that getting things such as place settings and the colour of an environment right (or neurogastronomy) has the potential to double food sales.

Another skill for chefs

Stefan Cosser, a former senior development chef at Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck experimental kitchen, said: “Neurogastronomy is simply knowledge that can be added to a chef’s repertoire like any other skill that applies to our job.”

The University of Oxford’s professor of experimental psychology, Charles Spence, also highlighted how simple it was to use neurogastromy in a business.

He said: “It depends on everything from eye-appeal on the plate to the shape and colour of the plateware.

“Food is never just food, no matter how wonderful what you prepare is. While [neurogastronomy] insights come from brain science, the actual suggestions are often very simple.”