Food, psychology, science and social media fused this week in a unique experiment from Artizian Catering and Digital Blonde, designed to explore the relationship between social media and food.
Expert panellists from the fields of digital media, psychology, foodology® and hospitality debate in front of packed room of delegates at the Telegraph Media Group’s headquarters.
With so many images of food shared and engaged with each day online, the experiment sought to understand how these reactions, emotions and experiences compared to the real thing. Food themed social media content can receive such high levels of engagement, seemingly generating very real emotions of desire, happiness and surprise – could these come close to, or be as powerful as the real-life experience of eating food?
The Experiment: Experiencing Dishes On And Offline – How Does It Compare?
For part one of the experiment Artizian Catering showcased their unique Foodology® concept to a packed room full of guests including leading food writers, consultants and guest of honour Antonio Carluccio. The seven course, fairy tale themed menu, devised by Artizian’s award-winning chef Richard Skinner, saw guests treated to a series of dishes each designed to provoke different emotions, including Hansel and Gretel’s Baked Bread Surprise, Goldilocks and The Three Bears Pea, Anchovy & Cured Ham Porridge and a Cinderella inspired Pumpkin Parfait.
For each course presented to them, guests were asked to rate and record their emotions both before and after tasting the dish. This data was then collated and compared with an online study, where participants who had not been at the dinner recorded their emotions after viewing images of the Artizian dishes.
To give a further comparison, two separate versions of the online survey were distributed; one displaying only the food images and one showing both the food images and a description of the dish.
The Results: #FoodPorn doesn’t compare to the real thing
A Social Media Week panel event on Thursday 25 September unveiled the experiment’s findings, with experts from both digital and food industries debating the findings.
Storytelling provokes a stronger emotional response: A scale of one to five measured the strength of participants’ emotions for both the offline tasting event and the online surveys. The results showed conclusively that people’s emotional reactions to the dishes were stronger offline, averaging a sore of 3.6. This fell to 2.7 for people viewing only the images online and interestingly increased to 3.0 for people who view the images accompanied by a description of the dish.
Adding descriptions to the online images also increased participant’s feelings of desire, disgust and surprise and made food appear more appetising than the images alone.
The scores suggest that the more consumers can know about and be part of a dish’s story, the stronger they feel towards it. Prompting the question of whether caterers and restaurants should be doing more to help consumers describe dishes, such as leaving menus on tables or having staff explain the dishes to diners.
Ultimately, the research highlighted there was no substitute for multi-sensory experience of eating food. While images of food receive high levels of engagement online and food with descriptions even more so, feelings and emotions were heightened across the spectrum when it came to actually eating the food. In fact, the study found that online people were more likely (29%) to have a neutral emotional reaction than in the real world, where the score was 11%.
What makes people share?
Inspiring desire: The research found people were more likely to share a food image if it created a feeling of desire or happiness. Other key reasons for sharing were when people feel surprise, when they felt a stronger emotion and if the dish appeared appetising. People were far less likely to share neutral emotions or feelings of disgust.
Surprise is key to sharing: The experiment found that if a dish created an initial emotion of fear, perhaps by containing an ingredient the participant didn’t like, the more positively they changed their tune after they had eaten it. Proving that initial feelings of fear make consumers more likely to share over the course of the meal. It seems that when expectations do not meet the fears, we feel a rush of pleasure or excitement.
What the Panel Had to Say:
The panel was hosted by Digital Blonde Karen Fewell, author of forthcoming book #foodporn and featured experts from the fields of psychology, social media as well as catering and hospitality. On the panel were: Chef Phil Howard – Two Stars Michelin Guide since 1998, Nathalie Nahai – The Web Psychologist, Ed Butcher – Head of Online at Square Meal, Sam Michel – Director of Chinwag and Artizian’s own Rob Kurz – Foodologist® and Tracey Fairclough – Commercial Director
As a regular judge of several chef competitions, including National Chef of the Year, Phil Howard offered his comments on images of food shared on social media compared to the real life experience: “At The Square, we are ultimately all about producing food that tastes delicious and much of the competition judging I do is based primarily on flavour. You can’t really appreciate the flavour of a dish through a picture. It is hard to judge on taste alone but the dishes that tend to shine through for me in competitions are ones with the best flavours.”
Having already undertaken considerable research for her forthcoming book #foodporn, Karen Fewell of Digital Blonde felt the findings of this experiment started to uncover some important issues for caterers to consider: “The initial findings and panel debate are purely the start of our journey into exploring how food, science and technology fit together. Over the coming weeks and months I will be delving further into the research and talking to chefs, operators and marketers about how this research impacts their marketing strategy, menu planning and even serving procedures. Just minutes after the data was first released, it raised concerns that encouraging diners to share more accurate descriptions with photos meant operational changes. But if the industry wants more people to share their dining experiences, then restaurateurs, chefs and front of house staff must create a story that sparks a strong emotion so consumers remember to relive and share, whether that’s online or via word of mouth.”
As part of the team behind the experiment, Rob Kurz Artizian’s Foodologist® commented on what constituted ‘good food’: “Good food is about seasonality and the best, locally sourced ingredients. It’s like music really, you can combine ingredients with lots of other elements to create more complex flavours or you can do something much simpler very well too. When it comes to the good food, we find you can often get such an explosion of flavours from just one single seasonal ingredient. With a photo being purely one dimensional, you’ll never quite be able capture that experience.”
Further Insights to Be Revealed:
Thursday’s panel session was just the start of deeper investigations into the relationship between digital media, food and human behaviour. There is further data to analyse and new insights to reveal, all of which are designed to offer valuable intelligence for the foodservice and hospitality industries. The forthcoming findings are set to be meaningful across all functions, going beyond the field of marketing and offering tangible benefits and insights at operations level too. For further details please email [email protected]
Download press release here .
Editors Notes:
- A copy of the findings presented at the panel session are available at: http://www.slideshare.net/karenfewell/
- Media enquiries and image requests to [email protected]
