The impact of a dining environment on making healthy food choices is a
pilot study financed by the Finnish Cultural Foundation during the years
2014 to 2015. This Project aimed to examine if environmental factors
can contribute to people’s vegetable consumption and furthermore,
promote healthier food choices. The study examined and observed how the
different qualities of the food and dining environment —especially the
food colours, dining colour surroundings, and the soundscape of the
dining environment — affects the food choices and the feeling of
comfort. In this pilot study we tested several research methods and
indicators to find the mcost appropriate tools to investigate and
measure the impact of environmental factors. This study is
multidisciplinary in nature and the researchers of the project come from
the disciplinary fields of food development, architecture, music
studies and marketing.



The research material consisted of four experiments that were
conducted during April 2015 in the teaching restaurant Prikka at the
Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences (SeAMK). The experiments were
lunches that were conducted together with SeAMK’s Hospitality Management
students and their course in Food Design. In total 209 people
participated in the study and 187 answers were analysed.



The results of the experiments showed that the food colour, interior
colour and soundscape together contributed to the study participants’
feelings of comfort, but did not affect food choices. On the other hand,
the results also suggest that the food colour can affect food choices:
people chose more multicolour salads than monocolour salads. In addition
to the results, here we evaluated the suitability of the different
research and analysis methods to find the most applicable ones to use
when examining how environmental factors affect food choices and
feelings of comfort.