Functional lighting can control a specific wavelength in order to emphasize a desired color signal of an object. In this study, for the purpose of designing functional lighting for cheese, the effect of lighting on the palatability of cheese was analyzed from reflected light. To investigate the palatability difference caused by different illuminants, a psychophysical experiment was conducted using five types of cheese under metameric lighting with fixed color temperature and illuminance. A total of eight observers participated in this experiment: four of them who loved eating cheese were classified as group A, and the remaining four who disliked eating it were classified as group B. The experiment revealed that observers in group A agreed that illumination sources made the cheese look most palatable, whereas observers in group B showed variability in their preferred light sources. Based on these results, guidelines for designing an illumination source that can improve cheese palatability by controlling the wavelength band were determined, under the constraint that the reflected light exists within a specific chrominance region.