When looking at the different fast food chains one question always pops into my head, why do most of them have the colors red and yellow?  Are they sending a message through using those colors?  I decided that I needed to figure out why these colors were being used at so many different fast food chains, for example, McDonalds, Chick-fil-A, and Pizza Hut.

Whenever I looked at the McDonalds golden arches with the red background on my way home from school, I always suddenly needed food.  Then a lot of times I would end up stopping to get something from the Drive-Thru.  I always wondered what it was that always made me want the food, until now.  After researching, I discovered that the colors red and yellow actually make people hungry.

Looking at the colors individually from a psychological standpoint, the color red makes us feel “comforted and loved”.  It gives us the warm feeling inside that we always have when eating something that was made with love.  Paired with the color yellow which is “cheery and exciting”, it causes our metabolism to speed up causing us to get hungrier faster; therefor, industries like Subway and Starbucks should think about changing their colors so their consumers will buy more often from them.

I never thought that red and yellow paired together would ever cause me to be hungrier after looking at them.  After doing this research it is now clear why every time I walk downtown or see a McDonalds I always want to stop in to get some chicken nuggets.