Sensory subterfuge

It is no secret that marketers find all manner of ways to encourage (some might say trick) us into purchasing their products. This of course extends to the world of food, where packaging is studiously designed to make you want to grab that particular item off the shelf. There’s one marketing trick that I had never even considered until I saw a post from Scientific American about the mesh bags that hold many fruits and vegetables.

I always assumed those bags were a practical affair – something that breathes but that will keep the (mainly spheroid) items from falling out and rolling across the floor. However, those bags contain a sneaky secret that Scientific American calls “sensory subterfuge”: the color of the bags makes us think that the fruit is riper than it really is.

This phenomenon is called the ‘confetti illusion’. Color researchers found that if you lay a pattern of stripes or checks over an object, the object seems to take on a different hue depending on the color of the lines. Therefore an orange bag can make oranges look, well, more orange and therefore seem more ripe. This holds true for lemons, limes, and other produce. It’s not just that the fruits and vegetables come in bags to be color matching, the color is chosen to be close to the perfect ripeness for the particular product. If you can buy fruit and vegetables that are displayed without bags you can more easily ascertain whether or not the produce is really ripe.