Cheese and onion or salt and vinegar? How the colour of your crisp packet can affect how they taste

In the national consciousness, crisps in a blue packet should taste of salt and vinegar while those within a green wrapper will have a whiff of cheese and onion.
Or so some manufacturers claim.

But a closer inspection of supermarket shelves may leave crisp fans confused.

Research carried out by Charles Spence at the University of Oxford found the wrapper colours for Salt and Vinegar and Cheese and Onion crisps can affect the product’s taste.

While most brands still come in the ‘original’ colours that many will remember from their childhood, Britain’s leading producer, Walkers, does not.

Research carried out by Charles Spence, professor of experimental psychology at University of Oxford, found the wrapper colours for Salt and Vinegar, and Cheese and Onion crisps can affect the product’s taste.

‘Many subjects will taste the colour of the crisp packet, not the crisp itself.

 

'Our brains excel in picking up associations and using them as shortcuts,’ he said.

‘When the colour makes us expect something to taste a certain way, we’ll taste what we expect. Having packets which are different to the norm causes unnecessary confusion.’
A 2009 Mintel survey found the most popular flavour of crisp is Cheese and Onion, followed by Ready Salted and then Salt and Vinegar.

More than four in five of us eat crisps regularly, with one in 10 munching on at least one packet a day.

Now Golden Wonder, who first launched Cheese and Onion in green packets and Salt and Vinegar in blue back in the early 1960s has started a petition calling on all makers to package both flavours in the same coloured wrappers.

Disparity between the brands is confusing shoppers and causing them to mistakenly buy the wrong flavour, one crisp firm claims

Disparity between the brands is confusing shoppers and causing them to mistakenly buy the wrong flavour.
They claim the current mix-up is the result of Walkers’ decision to change their packaging in the mid-1980s.

Golden Wonder sell 13 million bags of Cheese and Onion, and five million of Salt and Vinegar each year.

Scott Guthrie, group marketing director at Tayto, which owns Golden Wonder, said: ‘I grew up in the days when blue meant Salt & Vinegar and green meant Cheese & Onion, so I am as frustrated as anybody by the confusing crisp shelves.

‘We’ve seen more and more customers bringing up their own frustrations about crisp packet colours in the past few months, from letters to Tayto to endless of conversations on Facebook and Twitter.
'We know it’s a real issue with the public.

‘Customers instantly identify snack flavours by colour so why confuse shoppers by putting Cheese & Onion in blue packets and Salt & Vinegar in green packets? With our petition we hope to standardise packaging across the market to the way it should be.’