László Bendegúz Nagy

Who they are

Nagy and Temesi are listed at the Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences. The participants were recruited on the Buda Campus in Budapest in October 2023. This page holds no further detail about his career, and none is assumed.

Key papers

Nagy, L. B., & Temesi, Á. (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.

The article text on PubMed Central was read.

Key ideas

The study used an experimental auction of the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak type with 102 participants, 69 per cent of them women and 97 per cent aged 18 to 25. Each product was 400 grams of organic pasta that differed only in the label's background colour: white, blue, green or black. Participants rated each pack on a seven-point scale for trust, sustainability, premiumness and healthiness, and bid for it.

Black was rated most premium, at 4.92 against 4.33 for white, 4.44 for blue and 4.42 for green. Black also drew the highest mean bid, 570.87 forints against 538.71 to 544.58 for the other three, a gap of roughly 5 to 6 per cent. Green scored highest on trust and sustainability, and healthiness scores sat between 5.04 and 5.21 for all four colours. In the authors' regression, premiumness and trust both predicted willingness to pay.

The paper states its own limits: a small sample of mostly young women at one university, and brightness and saturation that were not controlled, so black here means one label design and not a measured shade. A reader should therefore take the table as evidence about this pasta and these students. On this site it is the central number in the piece on why black packaging looks expensive.

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