Why Black Packaging Looks Expensive
In the food experiments that have tested it, black packaging reads as the more expensive choice. The lift is small beside price, depends on the product, and sits alongside weaker readings of healthiness, emotion and trust.
Answer to the question
Why does black packaging look expensive?
Because shoppers rate it that way in the tests that have been run. In a 2024 pasta auction a black label scored highest for premiumness, and in a 2025 German study a black can was seen as high quality and expensive. The effect is small beside price, depends on the product, and in one study came with a lower healthiness rating.
Key takeaways
- Nagy and Temesi (2024): in an auction with 102 Budapest students, a black pasta label scored 4.92 for premiumness on a seven-point scale against 4.33 for white, and drew a mean bid about 5 to 6 per cent higher.
- Buse and Meyerding (2025): German respondents saw a black can as high quality and expensive, but silver and black cans also looked less healthy, and colour carried under 10 per cent of the choice against about 40 per cent for price.
- Jonauskaite and colleagues (2020): across 30 nations, black was linked with sadness, fear and hate, so a premium reading is one meaning among several.
- Lyons and Wien (2017): premium ratings for red and green packs depended on whether colour matched the message, in opposite directions for hedonic and utilitarian products. Black was not tested.
A black pasta label scored 4.92 for premiumness on a seven-point scale in a Budapest auction, against 4.33 for the same pasta in white, and drew a mean bid about 5 to 6 per cent higher than the other colours. It is the strongest number in the small body of evidence on black packaging, and neighbouring studies record what black costs in perceived healthiness and trust.
The measurements come from two small food studies, one in Germany and one in Hungary, in which shoppers rated a black pack as more premium than a white, green or blue one. The wider line, that black is simply the colour of luxury, has no measurement behind it. The general case that colour means different things in different settings is made in [What Red Actually Does](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/what-red-actually-does), so this piece takes black alone. What a luxury label buys beyond the look is the subject of [What the Luxury Label Actually Buys](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/what-the-luxury-label-actually-buys).
A semiotic reading of the black label
One semiotic study of food labels reads black as a code for quality and distinction. Carla Pereira, of the Federal University of Campina Grande, analysed food packaging in ten colours for her doctoral research and published the black subset in 2017 in the journal Revista FAMECOS. She treated colour as a sign system, using the linguistic theory of Saussure and the classification models of Peirce and the Groupe µ. Her conclusion is that black packaging and labels reflect a spreading taste for luxury in industrialised food, and that they reproduce the signs of social distinction that luxury goods have long carried.
Martin Lindstrom's Buyology (2008) makes the wider claim that a brand lives in its sensory cues and that congruent cues beat the logo (chapter 8). It is used here for that framing only. The chapter's two scans paired smell and sound with sight, not colour, and the book's luxury-pricing passage names no researcher, year or sample.
Pereira's study is an interpretation of packages, not a test of shoppers. At abstract level the paper gives no count of the packages examined and no consumer sample. Explanations for why black took on the role, whether restraint, formality or contrast with brighter neighbours on a shelf, are plausible and are not tested in any of the studies here. Whether shoppers read the code that way is the question the experiments below ask.
From stated price to experienced taste
The step from a premium look to a premium experience has one well-tested link, and it runs through price. In 2008 Hilke Plassmann and colleagues scanned 20 adults who were told they would taste five Cabernet Sauvignons, each identified by its retail price. The same wine was rated more pleasant when labelled $45 than when labelled $5, and Buyology reports that study.
Researchers group results of this kind under the marketing placebo effect, and the everyday rule behind them, the price-quality heuristic, is the habit of treating a dearer product as a better one. Both concern a stated price. A black label is not a price tag, and the packaging studies below stop at ratings and bids, with no tasting of food from black and white packs to see whether a premium look raised the experience itself. [Why the Dearer Wine Tastes Better](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/why-the-dearer-wine-tastes-better) covers the wine scan in full.
A black label is not a price tag, and the packaging studies below stop at ratings and bids.
Does black cost anything in emotion and trust?
Black carries other meanings besides prestige. Domicele Jonauskaite and colleagues asked 4,598 participants in 30 nations, speaking 22 native languages, to link 20 emotion concepts with 12 colour terms. The patterns were broadly similar from nation to nation, closest between Switzerland and France and loosest for Egypt. The associations that cleared a probability of four in ten included black with sadness, fear and hate. Those are responses to the word for a colour, not to a pack, and they explain why a brand buying prestige cannot assume black packaging carries only prestige.
A test closer to commerce found a similar penalty. More than 200 participants rated eight finance, eight legal and eight medical websites for trustworthiness, each person seeing one site at a time, identical apart from its colour scheme across red, blue, green and black. The blue scheme came out most trustworthy and black least. The authors called the effect statistically significant but limited, and the sites were mock-ups. [Why Brands Reach for Blue](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/why-brands-reach-for-blue) sets that result out in full.
Premium follows fit more than hue
Premium ratings in one pair of experiments depended on the fit between colour and message. Sarah Joy Lyons and Anders Hauge Wien ran two between-subjects experiments on package colour and the message printed with it, using red and green and not black, and published them in Food Quality and Preference in 2017. The first experiment used a hedonic product and the second a utilitarian one. For the hedonic product, premium evaluations were higher when colour and framing matched: red with a tasting-delicious message, green with a healthy one. For the utilitarian product the pattern reversed, and a mismatch scored higher.
The abstract names product types, hedonic and utilitarian, rather than specific foods, so the result describes categories and not brands. What carries over is narrower than a rule about black: in their data, premium ratings tracked the fit between colour and message, which the authors frame as colour-product congruency, and the direction of the fit depended on the kind of product.
What two food experiments measured
Two recent experiments put black packaging on food against other colours. One, by Saskia Buse and Stephan Meyerding, appeared in 2025 in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Research. Two choice experiments in Germany used 222 participants aged 19 to 35 and two foods, chickpeas and ravioli. An image query then showed six chickpea can colours: green, red, light blue, beige, silver and black. Respondents saw the black can as high quality and expensive. Silver and black also made the product look less healthy. Green was the colour tied to sustainability, and light blue was linked with artificial additives. In the health-oriented segment, silver and black received similar ratings on the healthy-food item, and both were rated low.
The other was an experimental auction, run by László Bendegúz Nagy and Ágoston Temesi and published in Foods in 2024. It used 102 students, 69 per cent of them women and 97 per cent aged 18 to 25, recruited in Budapest in October 2023. Each bid was for 400 grams of organic pasta that differed only in the label's background colour. Participants scored each pack on a seven-point scale and bid for it.
| Label colour | Premiumness (1 to 7) | Mean bid (HUF) |
|---|---|---|
| White | 4.33 | 544.58 |
| Blue | 4.44 | 538.71 |
| Green | 4.42 | 543.59 |
| Black | 4.92 | 570.87 |
Black scored highest for premiumness and drew the highest mean bid, a gap of roughly 5 to 6 per cent over the other three. It cost nothing on healthiness here, where all four colours sat between 5.04 and 5.21. Green led on trust (5.21) and sustainability (4.70), so each colour won a different judgement. In the authors' regression, premiumness and trust both predicted willingness to pay, which ties the premium rating to what people bid. The authors note a small, young, Hungarian sample, and that brightness and saturation were not controlled, so black stands for one label design and not for a measured shade.
Black scored highest for premiumness and drew the highest mean bid, a gap of roughly 5 to 6 per cent over the other three.
The two studies disagree on health: black lowered it for chickpeas and left it level for pasta. The products, countries and designs differ, so the evidence cannot say which difference matters.
Beside price, colour was a minor input. The German experiments varied colour, label, price and origin together, so the weights compare like with like. Price carried 42.88 per cent of the choice for chickpeas and 40.43 per cent for ravioli, while the pack's colour carried 9.5 and 8.6 per cent. A black pack changes how a product reads more than it changes what people choose.
Common questions
Why does black packaging look expensive?
Because shoppers rate it that way in the tests that have been run. In the 2024 pasta auction a black label scored highest for premiumness, and in the 2025 German study respondents saw a black can as high quality and expensive.
Why it happens is less settled. A 2017 semiotic study of food labels argues that black has become a code for quality and distinction, which is an interpretation and not a measurement.
Does black packaging make food seem less healthy?
Sometimes. In the German chickpea study silver and black cans looked less healthy. In the Hungarian pasta auction, healthiness scores were level across white, blue, green and black, between 5.04 and 5.21 on a seven-point scale.
Is black packaging a sign of luxury everywhere?
The evidence here cannot say so. The two experiments come from Germany and Hungary, and the semiotic study rests on one researcher's reading of food packs. The 30-nation colour-emotion study linked black with sadness, fear and hate, so a premium reading is one meaning among several and it may depend on the product and the market.
Does black packaging make people pay more?
In one pasta auction the mean bid for the black label was about 5 to 6 per cent above the others, in a sample of 102 students. In the German study price carried about 40 per cent of the choice and colour under 10 per cent. The evidence supports a small lift, not a large one.
Sources
Nagy, L. B., & Temesi, A. (2024). “Color Matters: A Study Exploring the Influence of Packaging Colors on University Students’ Perceptions and Willingness to Pay for Organic Pasta.” Foods, 13(19), 3112. doi:10.3390/foods13193112.
Buse, S., & Meyerding, S. G. H. (2025). 'Impact of packaging color on choice and health perception: insights from chickpeas and ravioli in Germany.' Journal of Agriculture and Food Research, 19, 101690. doi:10.1016/j.jafr.2025.101690.
Pereira, C. (2017). 'O preto como signo de qualidade e distinção na comunicação da embalagem de alimentos.' Revista FAMECOS, 24(1). doi:10.15448/1980-3729.2017.1.23706.
Lyons, S. J., & Wien, A. H. (2017). 'Evoking premiumness: How color-product congruency influences premium evaluations.' Food Quality and Preference, 64, 103-110. doi:10.1016/j.foodqual.2017.10.006.
Jonauskaite, D., Abu-Akel, A., Dael, N., Oberfeld, D., and colleagues, with Mohr, C. as senior author (2020). 'Universal Patterns in Color-Emotion Associations Are Further Shaped by Linguistic and Geographic Proximity.' Psychological Science, 31(10), 1245-1260. doi:10.1177/0956797620948810.
Alberts, W. A., & van der Geest, T. M. (2011). 'Color matters: color as trustworthiness cue in web sites.' Technical Communication, 58(2), 149-160.
Plassmann, H., O’Doherty, J., Shiv, B., & Rangel, A. (2008). “Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness.” PNAS, 105(3), 1050–1054.
Lindstrom, M. (2008). Buyology: How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy Is Wrong. London: Random House Business Books. Used for framing only.