Katharina Steiner

Who they are

Steiner is listed with the Department of Psychology at the University of Vienna, the same department as her co-author Arnd Florack, who is the corresponding author. The review was published on 25 October 2023 in Foods, volume 12, issue 21. Beyond this paper, this page holds no biographical detail, and none is guessed.

Key papers

Steiner, K., & Florack, A. (2023). The influence of packaging color on consumer perceptions of healthfulness: A systematic review and theoretical framework. Foods, 12(21), 3911. doi:10.3390/foods12213911. The full text was read.

Key ideas

The review sets out to answer a gap it identifies: most colour research on packaging had examined taste, while research on health perception was limited. It searched one database, followed PRISMA guidelines and included English-language studies of adults. The final sample was 20 articles with 35 individual studies.

On hue, cool colours, blue and green, were linked to higher healthiness ratings in most studies but not all. On green, labels often helped people identify healthier products and green calorie labels were seen as healthier than red ones, but the advantage was inconsistent, holding for men only in one study and losing to a white label with a smiley face in another. On saturation, the studies conflicted. Lighter packaging was linked to higher healthiness ratings in one study, at the cost of lower tastiness and purchase intention.

The authors propose three routes from colour to judgement that can operate together: colour used as an explicit health signal, colour that triggers beliefs that shape health judgements indirectly, and colour that evokes mental simulations. They list product category, country, gender and attitudes to healthy eating as moderators.

They also state their own limits. Most studies relied on self-report, methods varied widely and the proposed framework is theoretical and untested. Their conclusion is that the evidence that colour can influence health judgements is strong, and their discussion of green is hedged: where health is unexpected, as with chips, the effect might disappear.

For this site the review is the map for the question of green packaging. It is cited in Does Green Packaging Look Healthier alongside the concept Colour as a Health Cue.

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