Carla Pereira

Who they are

Pereira is listed on the article as affiliated with the Universidade Federal de Campina Grande (UFCG). The article is an excerpt from her doctoral research, which examined food packaging in ten colours; the 2017 paper reports only the black subset. This page holds no further detail about her career, and none is assumed.

Key papers

Pereira, C. (2017). O preto como signo de qualidade e distinção na comunicação da embalagem de alimentos. Revista FAMECOS, 24(1), Mídia e Cultura section, published 2 January 2017. doi:10.15448/1980-3729.2017.1.23706.

Only the abstract and journal record were read for this page. The full text was not obtained, so details such as the number of packages examined are not reported here.

Key ideas

The article treats colour as a system of signs. Its theoretical frame draws on Saussure's linguistic theory and on classification models from Peirce and from the Groupe µ, and it applies them to packaging in which black is the dominant colour.

Its conclusion, as the abstract states it, is that black packages and labels reflect a broader spread of taste for luxury in industrialised food, and that they reproduce signs of social distinction. In other words, the claim is that black on a food label has become a code for product excellence, borrowed from the way luxury goods have long presented themselves.

That is an interpretation of a body of packaging, and it should be read as one. It describes what the author takes the code to be. It does not measure how shoppers respond to the code, which is a separate question that experiments such as the 2024 pasta auction by Nagy and Temesi and the 2025 German study by Buse and Meyerding attempt to answer. The abstract does not state how many packages were analysed or how they were selected.

The article is the semiotic strand in the piece on this site that asks why black packaging looks expensive. It supplies a proposed meaning, and the experimental papers supply the measurements of whether shoppers hold it.

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