How packaging convinces you food tastes better

Supermarket food packaging doesn't just tempt you into putting it in your basket - new Which? research reveals that the packaging actually increases how tasty you perceive a product to be.

To test the power of packaging, we asked two groups of people to taste and rate the chocolate chip cookies from the premium, standard and budget ranges available at Asda, Sainsbury’s and Tesco.

One group was given the cookies with their packaging and one group tasted the cookies without.

The group that saw the packaging rated all the cookies significantly higher overall, and, crucially, for taste. Both groups ranked the cookies in order of price based on taste and appearance alone, but our test suggests that the packaging made all the cookies seem tastier.