Consumers’ Expectations Elicited by Frozen Food Packaging Colors in Digital Environments

Research has widely shown the influence of colors on consumers’ choices, in particular the colors of packages. Actually, research is more focused more on physical stores than in the online ones, despite the growing impact of ecommerce. To this end, we have organized a lab experiment with 220 participants, divided into 4 groups, involved to rate some packages of frozen foods, presented online in different hues (yellow, green, blue, and red). Specifically, they had to evaluate the perceived trust, the freshness of the product, the degree of perceived integrity of the product packaging, the shelf-life length, and the perceived degree of continuity of the cold chain. Through the application of Kruskal-Wallis tests, we found that with reference to the dimension of trust, green and yellow seem to be the best colors; with regards to sensation of freshness only yellow emerges as a successful color; finally, once again, yellow is the color which better stimulate a good perception of integrity of the package. Some managerial implications and limitations of our study are finally discussed.