What Is Food Design? A Guide for Chefs and Restaurateurs

Serve the same strawberry mousse on a white plate and on a black one, and many diners will tell you the first is sweeter. Nothing about the recipe has changed. What changed is the design around it. Food design is the discipline that takes this seriously: the intentional shaping of what we eat, what we eat it with, where we eat it and how the act of eating unfolds. It sits between cooking, product design, architecture and psychology, and it matters to anyone who serves food for a living.

What is food design?

Food design is the practice of designing food and everything that touches the experience of eating it, from the edible object itself to the plate, the utensil, the room, the service and the system that brings it to the table. It applies the tools of design (research, briefs, prototypes, testing) to food rather than leaving every decision to tradition or instinct.

The term covers a wide field. A chef developing a new dish is doing a kind of food design. So is an industrial designer shaping a mass-produced snack, an architect planning a dining room, or an artist staging a meal to make people think about waste. What unites them is intention: each decision is made on purpose, for a reason that can be explained and tested.

How is food design different from cooking or food styling?

Cooking is mainly concerned with flavour, technique and nourishment. Food styling is mainly concerned with how food looks to a camera. Food design includes both but asks a broader question: what should this eating experience be, and what needs to be designed to make it so?

A chef plating a dessert is cooking and styling. A chef who also chooses a matte plate to make the colour read warmer, serves it with a spoon heavy enough to feel generous and times it to arrive as the room lights dim is doing food design.

What are the branches of food design?

The researcher Francesca Zampollo, founder of the Online School of Food Design, has mapped the field into sub-disciplines, as summarised in a Goethe-Institut feature on food design:

• Design with food. Chefs and food scientists using food as the material, pushing the boundaries of culinary arts.
• Food product design. Edible objects designed to be mass produced, the realm of industrial designers working with food.
• Design for food. Non-edible objects used to prepare, serve or eat food: tools, tableware, packaging.
• Food space design. The design of the spaces where cooking and eating happen.
• Eating design. The design of the act of eating itself.
• Food service design. The design of how food is served, which Zampollo urges people to think about beyond restaurants.

Around these sit three broader circles in her map: critical food design, food system design and sustainable food design. The map is one researcher's framework rather than an official standard, but it is a useful way to see where your own work sits. A restaurant touches at least four of these branches every night.

Who shaped food design as a field?

Many people, but the Dutch designer Marije Vogelzang is often cited for eating design in particular. According to her Wikipedia biography, she graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven in 2000, began the Proef restaurant and design studio in Rotterdam after meeting Piet Hekker in 2004, later opened a second Proef in Amsterdam, became head of the academy's Food Non Food department in 2014 and founded the Dutch Institute of Food and Design in 2015.

Her own description of the work is revealing. In an interview with the Alimentarium, she said, "I design experiences based on the act of eating," and explained that she does not design food itself because "food is already perfectly designed by nature." Her projects include a blindfolded feeding session in which participants exchanged food memories and stories, and a dinner in which 40 people took bites together to a drumbeat.

The designer Martí Guixé is named in the Goethe-Institut feature as working on the food product side: edible objects capable of being mass produced. Chefs have joined in too: the plate colour work described below involved the chef Ferran Adrià.

What does the research say about how design changes taste?

It says that the same food can taste different depending on how it is presented, and that guests will pay more for food that looks designed. Much of this comes from Charles Spence and his colleagues at the University of Oxford.

• Plate colour. In a study published in Food Quality and Preference in 2011, identical strawberry mousse was rated sweeter, more intense and more liked on a white plate than on a black one. Plate shape made no significant difference in that study. A 2015 Science in School article reports the gap in perceived sweetness as about 10 per cent.
• Sound. The same article reports Spence's finding that people associate higher musical notes with sweetness and deeper ones with bitterness.
• Composition. In a 2014 study in the journal Flavour, reported by NPR, 60 diners were served one of three salads with identical ingredients: one arranged like a Kandinsky painting, one in neat rows and one heaped in the middle. The Kandinsky plate was rated best by an 18 per cent margin, and diners said they would pay twice as much for it.

Two cautions apply. These are mostly small studies with modest numbers of participants, and effects vary with culture and context. Treat them as prompts to test in your own room, not laws.

The plate is part of the recipe. So is the room.

How can a restaurant use food design without gimmicks?

Use it to make the food easier to understand and enjoy, not to distract from it. A practical approach:

1. Start from the guest's moment. Is this a quick lunch, a celebration, a shared table? The design should serve that moment. Read more on building dishes from an idea in how to develop a signature dish.
2. Test the plate, not just the recipe. Try the dish on two or three plates and with two weights of cutlery. Ask staff and a few regulars which version tastes better, without telling them what changed.
3. Design for the hand and mouth. A dish that is hard to cut or eat in one bite causes small frustrations that guests remember. Size each element to the utensil you serve it with.
4. Think in sequence. A meal is a series of moments. Contrast in colour, temperature and texture across courses keeps attention without theatrics.
5. Brief the room together with the food. Lighting, music and acoustics change perception. When working with designers, use a shared brief between architects, chefs and operators so the space and the menu pull in the same direction.
6. Edit hard. Good food design often removes things. A garnish that adds nothing, a smear that blurs the colour, a prop that slows service: take them away.

A useful check: if you removed the design element, would the guest miss it? If not, it is decoration, not design.

Where is food design heading?

Towards systems and consequences, not only plates. Zampollo's outer circles, sustainable and critical food design, point to designers working on how food is produced, packaged, shared and wasted. For restaurants, that shows up in practical choices: menus that use a whole animal or vegetable, packaging for delivery that keeps food intact without excess, and dining formats that encourage sharing.

It also connects to how menus are chosen in the first place. A design-led kitchen tends to work with a clear point of view and a short list of ingredients, which is close to what curated food means when done well.

Key takeaways

• Food design is the intentional shaping of food and everything around eating it: the object, the tools, the space, the service and the system.
• It differs from cooking and food styling by asking what the whole eating experience should be.
• Francesca Zampollo's map of sub-disciplines (design with food, for food, food product, food space, eating and food service design) helps locate any project.
• Research from Oxford suggests plate colour, sound and composition change perceived taste and willingness to pay, though studies are small and context matters.
• Use design to clarify and simplify. If removing an element would not be missed, remove it.