Project
Healthy odors for healthy food choices
A key challenge of the World Health Organisation is to make the healthy choice the easy and preferred choice. Explicit health communication and education aiming to cognitively convince consumers have not been successful in driving this choice. A new and promising strategy is to subtly coax consumers towards the healthy choice through changes in the product or environment.
Odors clearly play an anticipatory, appetizing role for eating behavior. For example, the smell of freshly-baked bread induces appetite, may entice you to buy it and eventually to eat it. But although food odors can induce specific appetite, this does not always result in actual eating and purchase behavior. The crucial missing step is thus to unravel how odors stimulate appetite feelings for healthy products, and under which circumstances they determine healthy food choices. With this knowledge, we can develop new approaches to change unhealthy eating behavior into a healthier direction.
Several in-depth studies will be carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of odors and robustness of their impact over different environmental contexts on behavioural measures, as well as analyze the underlying psycho-physiological mechanisms. The project will build from controlled experimental lab studies to immersive simulated lab settings and real-life contexts, using state-of-the-art technologies for controlled odor delivery to allow integration of sensory modalities to create an immersive consumer experience.