‘Hot stuff’: Making food more desirable with animated temperature cues

Nothing beats a comforting image of a bowl of hot soup with curls of rising steam unless it is the actual soup, but the current paper is to talk about food photography. Despite the recognition of the importance of food temperature depicted in food images, the effectiveness of using visual cues on food photography to indicate temperature and potential managerial outcomes are barely researched. This study explored whether the addition of visual temperature cues to food images was effective in activating relevant temperature associations, leading to downstream consequences, including food desirability, freshness perception and willingness to pay (WTP), with a focus on thermal temperature cues. Three online experimental studies were conducted showing that animated traces of steam added to food images not only induced hot temperature perception of the food, but also increased food desirability and freshness perception. Meanwhile, implied animation (i.e., static picture of rising steam) did not produce any such effect. Further, food image appeal was found to be a boundary condition for the effect of hot temperature cues: that is, when the food images is of low appeal, traces of steam which increased hot temperature perception, in turn enhanced freshness perception and food desirability, but not WTP. The effectiveness of animated steam textures crossmodally enhancing thermal temperature perception and food desirability exerts the potential in digital food creation and marketing.