At the store, I notice a common theme. Mild salsas have green prominently on their labels, while medium has yellow and hot has red.
Why is this?
WAG: like so many other “safety” signals, it’s been inspired by traffic lights.
It’s just one of those things that grows up over time and becomes an industry standard. Such as, fat-free foods are usually in green packaging, while low-carb foods are marked by light blue. Diet versions of a soda have a label which is more predominantly white or silver compared to the “standard” version of the same soda. Etc.
For anything with three categories of intensity, the stoplight color scheme is kind of an obvious choice.
Moving to Cafe Society.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
WAG, but it probably worked itself backwards. Red is hot, so salsa would naturally default itself to red to emphasize how hot it is.
OK, so you have a less hot salsa. How do you show that? You need another warm color and could do orange but that gets too confusing with red, so you go with your alternate, yellow.
From there, you’re 2/3rds of the way to the stoplight analogy. Not to mention it’s the third color of the three most common colors of bell peppers, and the choice is obvious. Green.