Serve your hot chocolate in an orange cup for maximum flavor

In December, we published a blog, Ten rules for the best-ever hot chocolate. Well it turns out there’s an eleventh rule – serve it in an orange or cream-colored cup. According to an interesting scientific factoid going around the web this morning (we found it in numerous websites, from South Africa to England to the United States to Australia), and 0riginally published in the Journal of Sensory Studies, how you serve food matters – and they proved it with hot chocolate. The Huff Post sums it up as follows in Cup Color Study Show Hot Chocolate Tastes Better in Orange:

“European scientists say they have found further evidence that how you serve food and drink matters hugely in the perception of taste.

Researchers at the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the University of Oxford recruited 57 volunteers and asked them to taste hot chocolate served in plastic cups with four different colours — white, cream, red and orange with white on the inside.

The chocolate was the same in all the samples, but the volunteers found that the flavour was better when the drink was served in the orange or cream-coloured cups.

 …Previous research has found that yellow containers boost the perception of flavour of lemons in soft drinks; beverages with cold colours, like blue, seem more thirst-quenching than warm colours like red; and if drinks are pink, they are perceived as being more sugary.”

We wonder if Starbucks is paying attention.