Complex Numbers

Tasting Red

Lies.

Everyone Likes Red and Pink Candies Best  
Sweets manufacturers are finally catching on and selling packages without the lesser colors.

It only takes one data point to falsify the headline. Here it is: Me. I don't like red and pink candies the best.

Article is from 2015, but I doubt time has blurred the edges on the point. To mix a metaphor.

There’s an Internet meme floating around...that implores, “Don’t ever let someone treat you like a yellow Starburst. You are a pink Starburst.”

One of the reasons I live a solitary lifestye: cherry-pickers. If there's a mixed bag of treats, I take what I get (though I generally prefer the orange ones, or, in the case of chocolate, the dark ones). Kind of like how I enjoy choosing these articles at random. But everyone I know roots through the bag looking for choice morsels, which skews the balance and thus offends my sense of what's right and pure in the world. In a perfect world, my tastes and theirs would be different. But even though my taste isn't aligned with that of the majority, they still narf the ones I like best. Some of that, I suspect, is trolling. More likely, though, is that friends have similar tastes.

Except for the guy I know who mixes Skittles with M&Ms in a bowl. That guy's going to Hell for sure.

The message acknowledges and plays on a widely held belief: that pink and red candies are the best and all the other flavors are also-rans.

Okay, I can accept it's "widely-held." Don't generalize that into "everyone."

This isn’t to say there aren’t outliers, but more often than not, people prefer their fruity candy in shades of red.

So why the extremist, clickbait headline? Oh, right. Because it's clickbait.

It’s reminiscent of the frequency with which people claim seven as their lucky number.

I don't play craps, either.

Last year Popsicle came out with Red Classics, a line of its ice pops that nixes grape and orange from the usual lineup and only contains strawberry, cherry, and raspberry, an assortment of reds. Starburst has its FaveReds, a version of the fruit chews that includes strawberry (aka pink), cherry, and in place of orange and lemon, two rosy flavors: fruit punch and watermelon.

I don't eat sweets all that much, so I wasn't aware of any of these things. I suspect this article came to my attention because it's Halloween candy season. It might be fruitful (pun intended) to see if any of these things are still being marketed, eight years later, but I can't be arsed. In any event, while I don't dislike strawberry or cherry Starburst, I'm not a fan of fruit punch and I actively despise watermelon. I'd rather have yellow Starburst than watermelon. Hell, if there were a shit-flavored Starburst and a watermelon-flavored Starburst, and I had to pick one, I'd have to think about it.

Mogelonsky speculated that red was nonthreatening and lacked the acidic quality that can turn people off lemons and other citruses. But it’s not only that. The importance of the color red, sometimes over or in place of specific flavors, is notable. What is fruit punch, when you think about it, but a generic, noncommittal red flavor that doesn’t even bother to associate itself with a specific fruit?

What is fruit punch? Ass. It's ass. Watermelon is moldy ass.

According to Charles Spence, a University of Oxford psychologist who studies how people perceive flavor and consults for major food and beverage companies, color has a bigger influence on flavor than most people are aware. “There are probably a couple of hundred studies now since the first ones in the 1930s showing that if you change the color of a food or drink it will very often change the taste of the person rating it,” Spence said. “You sort of think intuitively, well … the color isn’t part of the taste. And yet this growing body of research over the decades does show it can influence the taste in quite dramatic ways that can’t necessarily be overwritten.”

That's because taste isn't everything. It's the whole experience that matters. Nowhere was this more evident than during the Great Coke Crisis of 1985, a truly dark time in our history. Blind taste tests apparently indicated that people preferred the disgusting taste of New Coke to the tried-and-true formula. What the marketing gurus didn't seem to understand was that we were used to the taste of actual Coke, and had grown to like it. They learned. Eventually.

Speaking of Coke and red, a couple years ago Coke changed the packaging of their "Zero" product (which is what I drink now when I'm not drinking the harder stuff) from black cans to red. A slightly different shade than Coke/Santa red, but still red. I wonder if that increased sales, given the apparent preference for red, but again, I can't be arsed to research it. I didn't care, because it still tasted the same.

This "whole experience" thing is why you don't do blind taste tests of beer or scotch. I'll be the first to admit that I drink expensive scotch because it's expensive and I can. Are there cheaper whiskeys that are just as good? Probably. I don't care.

Regarding red, Spence said that studies have shown that “it seems like red is a particularly effective cue for sweetness, maybe because there’s a cue in nature, which is fruits going from green and sour and unripe through redder and sweeter and riper.”

A moment's thought should be enough to falsify that hypothesis. First, lots of sweet fruits aren't red. Oranges, e.g., or blueberries (it's right there in the names). Second, lots of red things aren't sweet. Like tomatoes.

Marcia Pelchat, a psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center who studies food preferences, disagreed with Spence’s theory. “I don’t think you can make an evolutionary argument that goes back to our primate ancestors. I think it’s shared cultural experience,” Pelchat said.

Another strike against evo-psych.

Confection and dessert companies are certainly aware of the power of red. “For our brand, red is a magical color,” said Nick Soukas, who oversees ice cream products at Unilever, the owner of Popsicle.

Maybe it's because meat is red, and meat is delicious.

As for me, I associate red with holidays I hate.

Spence agreed that anything novel can grab attention and sales. And in an era where you can custom-order any color of M&M’s online, in colors that used to be strictly unavailable, maybe other candy companies feel they need to flood the market.

Like I said, I don't eat much candy these days. But when I do, color is the least of my concerns.

As long as they're not watermelon flavored.