Bite into the agony and the ecstasy

Bite into the agony and the ecstasy
By: Suvarchala Naryanan

A new Swiss startup, Emoi, is using chocolate as a gustatory visualisation of different emotions

Have you ever wanted to convey a strong emotion towards someone and found that words fall short? Hallmark and Valentine’s day may have usurped that experience in the context of love, but what of the less palatable emotions like contempt, indifference, rage or even melancholy? As the jaunty animated film Inside Out points out, these so-called negative emotions are just as important and deserve expression.

Sonia Binzagr has set out to give these rather neglected emotions a voice with her chocolate-based startup, Emoi. But this is not your run-of-the-mill hipster artisan chocolate startup.

Chocolate, here, is used as a gustatory visualisation of different emotions. “Emoi came about because I wanted to address data visualisation but through a different medium. I felt like we focus too much on the visual and I wanted to explore taste as a means of communicating emotional information,” says Sonia.

Chocolate turned out to be a natural medium, given that we already associate it strongly with emotion and also because the large variation of flavours and textures lends itself to such an endeavour.

“With such a diverse palette, we thought, why not use it for a range of expressions,” she adds. She’s not exaggerating about that. The sheer range of emotional nuances Emoi attempts to capture would make a Jungian quiver. But it’s not just taste that is used to convey a particular emotion, but shape and texture as well.

She drew on research from psychological tools such as Geneva’s Wheel of Emotions that gauges emotional reactions to objects and situations, as well as famed Bouba-Kiki tests by psychologist Wolfgang Kohler, where subjects are shown two different shapes and asked to label them either Bouba or Kiki, both nonsensical arbitrary names.

Ninety-five per cent participants from different cultures associated bouba with smooth, curvaceous objects, and kikis with jagged angles and objects sharp to the touch. This same effect can be extrapolated to taste.

Studies by psychologist Charles Spence and colleagues found carbonated beverages, dark chocolate, sharp cheese, and Bitburger beer, for example, were labeled as kiki; milk chocolate and Brie were bouba.

Based on these theories and emotional categorisations, Emoi uses softly rounded shapes and ingredients such as raspberries and Yuzu to convey positive emotions such as love and ecstasy; sesame and cinnamon in half-moon shapes to convey longing; while sharply edged squares containing hints of garlic and chili allow you to gift wrap your rage or contempt.

One of the more interesting emotions includes Suspicion and Paranoia, represented by nutty texture and smoky flavor.

Of course, there’s an app to go with it. Using the Emoi app, you can customize the intensity of your feelings, choose a message to accompany your ‘gift’, or in case you’ve overdone the bird eye chili laced rage in your boss’ Christmas gift, there’s always the anonymity option
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