Food insecurity and sustainability are huge global challenges. Yet research suggests that farmers, retailers and consumers reject up to 40% of the food we produce because it simply looks unattractive.
New research published by Singapore Management University looks at the psychology behind consumers’ behaviour and how to mitigate its effects.
Read the original research: doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2025.06.004
Image Source: Adobe Stock Images / Goodmanphoto
Transcript
Hello and welcome to Research Pod! Thank you for listening and joining us today.
In this episode we’re looking at research published by Singapore Management University’s Business School into what stops grocery shoppers from buying less-than-perfect looking produce.
Different studies from around the world have found that up to 40% of fresh fruits and vegetables are wasted – not because they’ve gone bad, but because of how they look. Discoloured, bruised or mis-shapen fruit and vegetables are safe to eat – and taste just the same – but most consumers focus on the cosmetics and reject them, even when they’re reduced in price.
It’s therefore no surprise that supermarkets are reluctant to put unattractive food on their shelves, or that they demand aesthetically pleasing produce from their suppliers. But this results in huge amounts of wastage at different stages in the food chain. This is expensive for producers, retailers, and consumers alike.
In addition to this, the costs are not just financial. Much food waste ends up in landfills, which has implications for the environment, and food wastage is a social issue, as food security is one of the greatest challenges the world faces.
So what can be done to help? The research we’re looking at today focuses on the psychology behind this behaviour. Shilpa Madan from Singapore Management University, Krishna Savani from Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Gita Johar from Columbia Business School in the US, set out to test the argument that consumer choice is influenced by people’s belief that outer appearance reveals inner character.
Dating back to the ancient Greeks, the idea that beautiful-is-good and ugly-is-bad has a long pedigree across cultures and over time. Despite evidence to the contrary – and being warned to ‘never judge a book by its cover’ – many people believe that outer appearance reveals inner character. As a result, they ascribe desirable traits to attractive individuals and less pleasing traits to those deemed unattractive.
Of course, not everyone acts in this way, and people’s views change. But the bias towards appearance is strong and reinforced by popular culture. Think of the Disney movies many of us grew up with: heroes are often drawn to look attractive, friendly, and smiling, while villains are designed to look menacing with strange, exaggerated features, sinister expressions, and darker styling.
The research team set out to test what impact these beliefs about outer appearance revealing inner character have on consumers’ grocery choices, and what retailers could do to encourage more people to accept less-than-perfect produce.
To learn more, the researchers carried out five studies with groups of potential and real-life shoppers in Singapore and the United States.
In the first study, 213 participants from the US were asked to assess whether or not they believed that people’s outer appearance reveals their inner character. Then, they were shown images of both ideal and unattractive-looking strawberries which were supposedly for sale with short best-before dates. Participants then had to say what, if any, discount would make them buy the unattractive-looking produce.
As expected, participants who believed that appearance reveals character said they would pay less for the unattractive fruit than people who didn’t believe that appearance reveals character. In other words, consumers mistakenly generalized their beliefs about people’s appearance to a strawberry’s appearance.
The second study delved deeper and involved around the same number of US participants. However, in contrast to the first study where participants were asked whether they believed people’s outer appearance reveals character, in this study, half the participants read an article arguing that people’s outer appearance reveals their character but the other half read an article arguing that appearance has no link to character. All participants then saw images of both ideal and unattractive-looking sweet potatoes and asked how much they would be willing to pay if just one of the sweet potatoes in a large bag was unattractive. They were also asked what they thought about the quality of the unattractive sweet potato, including its taste, nutrition and enjoyability.
As before, the results demonstrated that participants who were made to believe that appearance reveals character wanted to pay a lower price for the bag that contained just a single unattractive sweet potato than participants who were made to believe that appearance does not reveal character. This choice to pay less was driven by worse quality inferences. Simply put, participants who were made to believe that people’s appearance reveals their character felt that the unattractive sweet potato would be poorer in taste, nutrition, and enjoyability, and this reduced their willingness to pay.
The third study was again conducted in the US, but involved twice as many participants, and was designed to find an intervention to stop consumers from generalizing their beliefs about people to produce. As in Study 1, participants first reported their beliefs about whether or not people’s appearance reveals their character. Then, they were randomly assigned to two groups and were shown promotional flyers for strawberries. The control group was shown a flyer with an image of an attractive strawberry labelled ‘Juicy, tasty, sweet, crunchy and a source of Vitamin C’. The second group was shown a similar flyer but with images of two strawberries, one attractive and the other unattractive, both labelled with qualities as before, but with the added tagline ‘Different outside. Same inside’. Participants were then shown images of unattractive strawberries and asked what level of discount would make them buy them and what they thought about the quality of these strawberries.
The researchers found that participants who believed that appearance reveals character still wanted to pay less than non-believers for the unattractive strawberries. However, their negative response was tempered by the intervention flyer with the message ‘Different outside. Same inside,’, as the discount they required became smaller compared to those who saw the control flyer. Those who saw the intervention flyer were also less likely to make poor-quality assumptions about the unattractive strawberries, despite holding appearance-reveals-character beliefs.
Next, to test the efficacy of the promotional message identified in the previous study, the researchers put it to test in Singapore in a field study.
This real-life field study was carried out with an organisation committed to reducing food waste and involved interviews with 200 shoppers outside a supermarket. Some were shown the flyer with “Different outside. Same inside” message that performed well in the previous study. Others were shown a flyer with the simple image of an ugly strawberry accompanied by the tag line ‘Try ugly produce – reduce food waste’.
Shoppers were then told that five participants would receive produce vouchers for participating in this study. They were given a choice — they could either have a voucher for Singaporean $75 worth of attractive produce, or Singaporean $100 worth of unattractive produce.
The findings were significant. Just over a third of shoppers who had been shown the simple ugly strawberry chose the higher value vouchers for unattractive produce, but this figure went up to more than half for the shoppers who had been shown the flyer with the “Different Outside. Same Inside” messaging about unattractive fruit.
The final test also took place in a real-life field setting, but back in America. It involved online Facebook ads for a business selling so-called ‘ugly veg’ straight from the farm. The test compared the effectiveness of three different ads by looking at the click-through hits received from those who wanted to ‘Learn more’.
Two of the ads showed the same messages used in the previous study. The control image showed a single atypical strawberry with the tagline ‘Try ugly produce’. The second image repeated this image and tagline, but added the text ‘Juicy, sweet and a source of Vitamin C’.
The third ad showed an ideal strawberry and an unattractive strawberry side by side, each with the text ‘Juicy, sweet and a source of Vitamin C’ and the tagline ‘Try ugly produce’, but with the additional text ‘Different Outside. Same Inside.’
The results were impressive and, like the other tests, indicate the value of simple but effective messaging. The ads were seen a total of 49,764 times and the ad with the message developed in the previous study received twice the number of clicks as the other two ads —twice the average number of hits Facebook ads usually receive.
Shilpa Madan, Krishna Savani and Gita Johar’s research into the impact of the appearance-reveals-character theory on consumer behaviour makes a significant and valuable contribution to what we know about product perception and aesthetics in marketing.
The study measures how some people’s beliefs in the theory are deep-set and
don’t just affect how we think about other people, but even extend to grocery habits. Although the ‘beautiful is good’ perception seems more strongly held in Singapore than the US, the researchers believe their findings are generally applicable across different cultures.
The study also provides practical insights to help food producers and retailers address the problem of food waste. For example, a simple and cheap way is to use marketing messages similar to those developed for the study that directly address consumer bias against unattractive produce.
One final take-away the researchers found is that although marketing messages helped to change the behaviour of those who believe the ‘beautiful is good’ theory, they did not have a negative impact on those who don’t believe the theory and are already happy to buy unattractive produce. Improved messaging is clearly a win-win.
That’s all for this episode – thanks for listening. Links to the original research can be found in the show notes for this episode. Stay subscribed to ResearchPod for more of the latest science.
See you again soon.
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