Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Supermarket Perimeter magazine. See the original post here.

Consumers buy with their eyes. Nowhere is that truer than in the grocery produce department, where color alone can pull a shopper into its aisles.

And to make colors pop, you have to have the right lighting, said Bill Plageman, vice president of marketing and product development for Oakland, N.J.-based Amerlux.

“There are a lot of colors out there — your lights should showcase them all,” Plageman said. “Color plays a critical role when laying out the produce department.”

Under the right light, meats look super fresh and marbled. Fish look like they were just pulled from the water.

And in the produce department, Plageman said, fruits and vegetables “burst with freshness.”

“Customers want to see the vivid, beautiful colors of fresh produce—and not lighting them properly can destroy that intent,” he said.

Under natural light, with its picture-perfect color-rendering capabilities, colors are vibrant. Textures come to life. And consumers are more likely to pick the well-lit fruit or vegetable.

“When you see a tomato that isn’t a nice red, do you think it’s old or perhaps not ripe? The right lighting can deepen the color and make the tomato appear as if it were just picked off the vine, ready to be eaten.”

Produce managers, Plageman said, must consider what type of rendering ability their lighting source delivers. If done wrong, lighting can oversaturate or undersaturate colors.

With the development of LED, color rendering has evolved and reinvented the in-store shopping experience, Plageman said.

“Today, we can deliver color as natural as the sun or enhance the natural color by slightly oversaturating the hue,” he said. “We never want to change color, but when you can add depth and texture to produce and other perishables, customers notice.”

The right lighting catches the eye of the customer. It makes them want to touch a fruit or smell the flowers. Most important Plageman said, it makes them want to buy.

Because online competition has chipped away at dry-good revenue, grocers are shrinking their center aisles and using LED lighting systems to draw attention to their renovated perimeter aisles, Plageman said.

Amerlux, which has more than 35 years’ experience lighting grocery perishable departments, offers its customers (and potential customers) free advice, free in-store mockups and help designing the right lighting scheme to help them sell more produce, Plageman said.

Now’s the time, he added, to give the produce in your stores a color makeover. Even the slightest changes in color rendering will be noticed by the majority of shoppers, he said.

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Want to learn more?

To learn more about how you can offer shoppers destination experiences with superior retail supermarket lighting, read “How to Shine a Colorful Light on Must-See Destination Retail.”