Multisensory Sweetness Enhancement: Comparing Olfaction and Vision

Given the emerging global obesity crisis, there has been growing interest in multisensory means of enhancing the perceived sweetness of food and drink products that do not necessarily rely on calorific (or non-calorific/artificial) sweeteners. While the most obvious route to enhancing perceived sweetness has traditionally involved the use of ‘sweet’ aromas, contemporary research demonstrates that visual (colour and shape), auditory (e.g. ‘sonic seasoning’), and even tactile stimuli (shape, texture, and temperature) can all be used to help optimize/modulate the perception of sweetness. In this brief review, I take a closer look at the putatively special status of those food odours that happen to take on the quality of sweetness and contrast this form of multisensory sweetness enhancement with that resulting from the use of food colours (e.g. pink and red) to help set the customer’s expectations of sweetness.