Investigating Environment–Beverage Matching: Effects on Expected and Perceived Palatability

The palatability of meals plays an important role in improving Quality of Life. While prior studies have established the main effect of a specific environment and shown congruency along a seasonal dimension, the interaction effect across locationally diverse environments and beverages within the same individual remains an open question. In this study, focusing solely on beverages, we examined the effects of matching a beverage with a virtual audiovisual environment on both expected and perceived palatability. We conducted a within-participants experiment ( \(N = 22\) ) using a 4 (forest, izakaya, beach, control) \(\times\) 2 (green tea, beer) design. Likelihood ratio tests revealed a significant interaction effect on both expected ( \(\chi^2(3) = 39.01, p < .001\) ) and perceived palatability ( \(\chi^2(3) = 25.46, p < .001\) ), indicating that, within the selected set of environment–beverage combinations, which environments are rated comparatively higher depends on the beverage. A strong positive correlation between expected and perceived palatability ( \(r_{rm}(153) = 0.705, p < .001\) ) suggests that expected palatability could serve as a pre-tasting indicator for selecting environments. Furthermore, analyses of evoked words suggested that the observed matching may involve shared cultural situational knowledge (izakaya \(\times\) beer) and overlapping sensory characteristics (forest \(\times\) green tea), with word similarity positively covarying with palatability evaluations. These findings suggest that, at least within the domain of beverages, assessing cultural and sensory congruency may provide a useful clue for selecting or designing environments where palatability is likely to be rated higher.