In this work, in order to assist designer in colour planning during product development, an efficient synthesised evaluation model is presented to evaluate colour-combination schemes of multi-working modes products (MMP). A novel bacterial colony foraging (BCF) algorithm is proposed to search for the optimal colour-combination schemes of MMP based on the evaluation model. The proposed BCF extend original bacterial foraging algorithm to adaptive and cooperative mode by combining bacterial chemotaxis, cell-to-cell communication, and a self-adaptive foraging strategy. The experiment presents an exhaustive comparison of the proposed BCF and two successful bio-inspired search techniques, namely the genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimisation (PSO), on three MMP tested cases of different nature, namely a hair-drier with two-coloured areas and two working modes, and two arm-type aerial work platforms both two-coloured products while with two and three working modes, respectively. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is feasible and efficient.