Descriptive Food Names

What it is

The wording tested is not decoration around a fixed fact. A descriptive name adds information about how the dish tastes or is made, and the research asks whether that information changes what people choose or how they rate what they eat. It is the opposite strategy to an ambiguous colour name, which withholds information and relies on the buyer to supply a reason.

Richard Shotton's book The Choice Factory cites the idea at pages 77 to 79, giving it as a six-week cafeteria experiment on 140 students in which descriptive names on a menu shaped how diners rated the food. The underlying paper is Wansink, van Ittersum and Painter, "How descriptive food names bias sensory perceptions in restaurants", Food Quality and Preference, volume 16, pages 393 to 400, 2005.

In effect

The 2005 paper was corrected in 2017. The corrigendum, published in Food Quality and Preference, volume 62, page 379, revised two tables, a figure and the method description. It corrected the design from six appearances of each menu item to four, and said that two values cannot be established because the raw data could not be retrieved. The journal's editors judged that the errors did not alter the basic conclusions and corrected the paper rather than retracting it. This site therefore treats the 2005 result as needing independent support before it carries weight.

Independent support of a related kind exists. Turnwald, Boles and Crum labelled vegetables in a large Stanford dining hall over one academic quarter of 46 days, in four ways: basic, healthy restrictive, healthy positive and indulgent. Preparation and presentation stayed the same. The restrictive label read "light 'n' low-carb green beans and shallots", the positive one "healthy energy-boosting green beans and shallots", and the indulgent one "sweet sizzlin' green beans and crispy shallots". Indulgent labels made diners 25 per cent more likely to take the vegetable than basic labels, 35 per cent more than healthy positive labels and 41 per cent more than healthy restrictive labels. The mass served was 23 per cent higher than under the basic label and 16 per cent higher than under the healthy positive one.

What it does not say

It does not say that descriptive names change how food tastes. The Stanford study counted who took a vegetable and how much was served. It was a single dining hall, one quarter and vegetables only, and its authors flagged that ordering from a menu without seeing the food remains untested.

It does not say the effect carries to colour. The labels in both studies name taste and texture, and neither tested a colour name. It does not say that a descriptive name beats an ambiguous one, because no experiment reviewed here compared the two strategies. And it does not rest on the 2005 paper alone: the Stanford result agrees with its direction, but the size of the effect for any other food or shop is unknown.

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