Does Smell Affect Taste? A Tasty Experiment

Does smell affect taste? Here’s a tasty science experiment to find out! Have kids sample candy using different obstables like plugging their nose or sniffing a strong scent while chewing and see if it affects the taste.

If you’re looking for more activities for kids try these easy science experiments using household ingredients! If you’re looking for another tasty activity try our OREO taste test challenge!

How Does Smell Affect Taste?

Have you ever had a cold and noticed that you weren’t able to detect a flavor in all of the foods you ate? That some foods may have tasted different or bland? This is because your sense of smell is closely connected to your sense of taste.

Does Smell Affect Taste? A Tasty Experiment.

Here is fun (and tasty) experiment to try to see what factors affect the sense of taste!

We have 3 sensory obstacles here to make it interesting:

1. Blindfold (this also tests the theory of how sight affects taste)
2. Plugged Nose
3. Another scent to distract

You can dice up small pieces of fruit or foods in a variety of flavors. If you placed a piece of banana in your mouth, you’d probably be able to figure out what it was even if you couldn’t taste it. So we chose to use candy for a uniform size, shape, and texture.

3 More Sensory Activities for Kids

Homemade Rock Candy

Homemade Noise (fart) Putty

I Spy Sensory Bean Box

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Does Smell Affect Taste? Tasty Experiment

Does smell affect taste? Here's a tasty science experiment to find out! Have kids sample candy using different obstables like plugging their nose or sniffing a strong scent while chewing and see if it affects the taste.

Active Time15 minutes mins

Total Time15 minutes mins

Cost: $2

Equipment

• small cups

Materials

• candy in a variety of flavors
• blindfold
• cotton balls
• essential oil or scented oil
• pencils
• printable results page

Instructions

• Start by having each child write down the flavors they will be sampling. You will record the rest of the results from here on out since they will be blindfolded and you don't want them to see what flavor they just tried.
  

The Blindfold Test

• This first one brings in another sense besides smell...sight! Give each child one flavor of candy and see if they can figure out which one it is! Write down their results. Repeat for remaining flavors.

  This gave mixed results. Some of the flavors (lemon and orange) tasted similar and were hard to figure out without the sense of sight, but overall they did a good job at figuring them out. They said that all of them had a strong flavor.
  

The Plugged Nose Test

• Repeat test, but have each child plug their nose while eating. Record their results.

  In the previous round, every candy had a strong flavor. In this round, they concluded that many did not seem to have a flavor at all.
  

Adding Another Scent Test

• Add a few drops of scented oil onto a cotton ball and place in a small cup so that the oil doesn't get on the kids' fingers. We used peppermint.
  
• Repeat test, having the child hold the cup under his/her nose, and record the results.

  This round, BY FAR, was their least favorite.

  "Everything tastes like peppermint!"
  

Notes

Some of the kids wrote "Can't taste" while others just blindly guessed what flavor it was and hoped to get a few right. While the results varied from child to child, the majority had the best results with only the blindfold and concluded that the other factors definitely had an affect on the taste of the candy.

So what do you think? Does Smell Affect Taste? Conduct your own experiment and see for yourself!

Check out one of our favorite science sites for kids!