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Snack names influence how filling we imagine they will be — new research
visibility comment0 event September 23, 2026 timer 14:42
Most people are likely unaware of how the sounds of brand names affect them.
People tend to associate some sounds like ‘ee’ or ‘t’ with smaller sizes, and others like ‘oh’ or ‘b’ with larger sizes. New research finds this impacts how we perceive our snacks. (Unsplash)Imagine being hungry in a grocery store and looking for a snack. You have a choice between Gobo granola bars or Kipi granola bars. Which do you reach for to fill you up? If you’re like the participants in our new study, you probably said Gobo.
There are many factors that affect our impressions of foods. For example, people perceive products with duller packaging to be healthier than those with vivid colours. People also tend to assume that snacks in a glossy package are higher in fat.
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In our new study, we looked at how the sound of a snack’s name impacts these impressions. In particular, we looked at whether the sound of a snack name can lead to expectations that the food is heavier/lighter and more/less filling.
We found that people expected foods with a “large” name like Norgo to be heavier and more filling than foods with a “small” name like Iskee.
Some sounds feel smaller
Our study made use of an effect that is almost 100 years old: the “mil/mal effect.” This is the less well-known sibling of the “bouba/kiki effect” — the tendency to pair some sounds with round shapes and some with spiky shapes, that was proposed by German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in the same year, 1929.
The mil/mal effect refers to the tendency for people to associate some sounds like “ee” or “t” with smaller sizes, and others like “oh” or “b” with larger sizes.
There are many different ideas about why this is. One is that it has to do with the size of your mouth as you pronounce the sounds (try saying “ee” and then “oh” for example). Another is that it comes from the sounds that small or big things make in the real world. Imagine the sound made by a baby chick, for example, compared to a bear.
What factors influence your choice of snack from a vending machine?
(Unsplash/Estera)
We wanted to know if this could affect how people think about foods. We tested more than 600 participants, giving them fictional brand names for different snack items. For example, we asked them to “imagine a new brand of potato chips called Tikee” or “a new brand of trail mix called Boge.”
These were invented words with sounds associated with smallness or largeness. We used a variety of foods, including both healthy foods like oatmeal and unhealthy foods like potato chips.
The names assigned to each food were shuffled for each participant.
What impacts your willingness to buy?
The participants were asked to rate how heavy and how filling they expected the food to be. We found that people expected snack names like Boge to be heavier and more filling than snack names like Tikee.
We also accounted for all kinds of factors like how long the names were, how much people liked them and how easy they were to say. And the type of food (healthy or unhealthy) didn’t matter at all for the effect of the name.
This is all interesting, but does it affect what people will actually buy? That is a bit more complicated. We asked people how likely they would be to buy each snack. In our first experiments it seemed people were no more likely to want to buy snacks with big or small names.
Though, for your interest, people most wanted to buy snacks named Teek and really didn’t want to buy snacks named Blorogo. Try to avoid that one if you are launching a new snack cracker.
It turns out that this willingness to buy depends on a person’s current goals. In one experiment we asked participants to imagine a friend who likes heavy filling food, or a friend who likes lean and light food. Depending on the friend, they were now more or less willing to buy foods with “small” or “large” names.
So, the sound of a snack name might actually affect willingness it buy, depending on the kind of food a person is currently looking for.
How about after eating?
It would be very interesting for future research to test whether product names can actually affect how full a person feels after eating food.
Sometimes people’s expectations for how an event will unfold affect how the event is experienced, even more so than the actual experience. So, if snack eaters expect a food to be filling, they might feel it has filled them up more after eating it than if they expect a light snack.
There is much more to learn about why people unconsciously choose to buy certain foods, and how they feel after eating them.
(Unsplash/Xennie Moore)
A future study should also look at actual products instead of just verbal descriptions. There are many aspects of a product — the shininess of the package, the shape, the colour scheme — that affect how it is perceived in addition to the name.
All these aspects together might tip someone’s perception of how filling a snack feels more than the name alone.
The next time you’re hungry and find yourself reaching for a Rolo instead of a Twix, or are looking for something lean and reach for Triscuits instead of Doritos, this might be why!
David Sidhu receives funding from The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).Johanna Peetz receives funding from The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).Rachel Burns receives funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). She has also received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), and the Ontario Research Fund.
Tags: Academic Journalism, The Conversation, The Conversation Academic News
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