How should the government improve the food label?
A project at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Journalism has taken on the task of designing a better food label, asking for ideas to replace the current black and white Nutrition Facts label that appears on every food package. Although the designs aren’t part of the official effort to redesign food packages, the Berkeley project has generated dozens of new ideas that are likely to be considered by the United States Food and Drug Administration, which is in the process of revising the existing food label. This fall, the Institute of Medicine is expected to release its own report on food packaging and labeling.
“We asked food thinkers and design minds to come together and give advice on how they might rethink the food label and bring some insight into how design impacts choice,’’ said Lily Mihalik, co-creator of the project and a fellow in the News21 program, which is a journalism fellowship supported by the Carnegie and Knight Foundations. “There are a lot of things right with the current label, but at the same time people are confused. The question is whether a new nutrition facts label could help people make more educated decisions.’’
The panel of judges included the food writer Michael Pollan; the consumer health activist Michael Jacobson; Dr. Robert Lustig, a San Francisco pediatrician; Laura Brunow Miner, a San Francisco graphic designer; and Andrew Vande Moere, a Belgian design professor.
The winning entry, from a San Francisco visual designer, Renee Walker, uses colorful boxes to depict the relative proportion of ingredients in a product. (Click on the photo to see four different examples of the label.)
“Walker’s design is dramatic, intriguing and holds great promise,’’ said Mr. Pollan. “I liked being able to see the visual breakdown of foods, although I wonder how her design would work with more complicated products, like Lucky Charms, say, or a PowerBar. Even so, it’s a step in the right direction. What I’d like to see next is some sort of color coding for the food groups and some attempt to show the degree of processing of various foods. Eating doesn’t have to be complicated; figuring out what’s in your food shouldn’t be either.”
Mr. Jacobson put the label in third place over all, and said he especially liked the graphic representation of food ingredients.
“I like the bold, colorful rectangles showing how much of which ingredients are in the food,” he said. “Of course, just listing percentages in the ingredient label would save a huge amount of space, but this graphic is a lot more attractive and easier to understand.”
The second place design, from Joey Brunelle, replaces serving size calories with total calories per package or bottle. A green, yellow and red color-coding system denotes reasonable, questionable or unhealthy amounts of carbohydrates or fat.
“I think Joey’s design works because it’s realistic for a consumer to read and benefit from,” said Ms. Miner. “It uses common iconography, like the red/green/yellow (stoplight), which I saw in a few designs, in an incredibly simple way. It’s one of the few designs that works at a glance.”
Two designs, from Bradley Mu, a freelance Web designer and recent interactive media graduate from Elon University in North Carolina, and Dylan Brown, creative director at Pixar Canada in Vancouver, British Columbia, tied for third place. Mr. Mu’s label mimics the traditional food label but uses color and highlights natural foods in green type and food additives in bold. It also features the glycemic index, a measure of how quickly a food increases the level of sugar in the body.
Mr. Vande Moere said that the green versus bold type would give food makers an incentive to include more healthful ingredients.
“The bar graphs are informative and minimalistic, while not making up the majority of allocated space,” he said. “The color coding is consistent, simple and meaningful.”
The design by Mr. Brown uses color-coded letter grades to rate food ingredients, offering green A’s and B’s, yellow C’s and red D’s and F’s.
“I like the minimalist approach,’’ said Mr. Jacobson. “Clear lettering, clear grades with added color-coding, and no fancy, space-taking graphs for people to puzzle over.”
He continued: “If anything, this label could convey somewhat more information, such as serving sizes. Too bad the food industry would never allow ‘F’ ratings to go on their labels.”
Although the judges gave none of the designs a complete endorsement, they noted that each label offered some improvement over the current food label. Other concerns, like the amount of processed ingredients in a food, were more difficult to represent in the label, noted Mr. Pollan.
“The focus on nutrients is probably inevitable, but it distracts from the issue of whether you’re getting real food or not,” he said. “The degree of processing matters more, very often, than the nutrients as expressed in a label. So how do we capture that?”
Although the judging panel has picked its favorites among the label submissions, the project is now asking members of the public to vote on their favorites. The project’s Web site, Rethink the Food Label, will take votes through midday Sunday and announce the winner next week. Visitors to the site can also view a slide show of all the submitted designs.
Discussion Questions:
ReplyDelete1. Which label do you prefer? Why?
2. Do you think redesigning the label would make a difference? Do you think it would it be easier for Americans to pick healthier options using one of the three labels above? Why or why not?
1. It's hard to pick one that is best, and they all seem better than the traditional label. Choosing one, I would go with Joey Brunelle's: It immediately gives the visual aspect of the relative levels of the nutrients, and by doing the red-yellow-green color scheme it's easy to make sure you're not buying something too high in fats or sugars. However, I also like the glycemic index and eco footprint of the last two: the amount of sugar doesn't tell you everything you need to know- adding the glycemic index also tells you how it will effect your blood sugar. Eco footprint just makes you feel good, but hopefully it really would have a positive environmental impact.
ReplyDelete2. I think redesigning the label will make a difference: if people can immediately see what is in the product without having to take time to read traditional food labels, then they will more than likely take that automatically-given information into account in their purchase. Now, it's easy to ignore the food label, thus it's easy to remain oblivious to how healthy or unhealthy a food item is. Ultimately, it's up to the individual to make their own food choices; but I think it's great to add anything that will make it faster and easier to determine what's in stuff- hopefully it would lead to less of undesirable things: childhood obesity, high medical costs, etc. The more healthy people there are in society, the better the society will be, in general, I think.
1. I prefer the second label(Joey's) because it uses three colors that a viewer automatically associates with good, ok, and bad. At the same time, Joey's design also has enough nutritional information on it to be more than just colored shapes. The amounts of fats, carbs, and protein are in large bold letters and complement the colored circles quite nicely. The calorie atop the label also gives an idea of the overall quality of the food, unlike the first and last designs which hide their calorie count behind elaborate designs.
ReplyDelete2. Yes, redesigning the labels would be helpful, I think, for three reasons. First, the current label has been in use since 1990 and is difficult to read, made in very small print. Secondly, kids are not interested in a black and white label, but because people of all ages are more attracted to color than to black and white and because the decisions of the younger generation are essential to their future health, I think a more colorful label would be beneficial. Finally, the statistical measures on each of the proposed labels were far clearer than those on the current nutrition facts label.
1. I felt that Bradley Mu's label is the best choice, as it is the only label that actually lists the ingredients in the food and also the only label with allergen information. To me personally it is important to know exactly what goes into the concoction I'm picking up, and while the other designs convey the healthiness of food through an easily understandable color scheme, the lack of ingredient listing is a serious flaw in my opinion. I also like that Mu's design lists the additives in bold print and puts an emphasis on the qualities organic, non-gmo, natural, and locally sourced. Renee Walker's idea of representing the percentage of ingredients in boxes is clever, yet it seems like something out of a contemporary art museum and is not practical for real world applications, the boxes would become so minuscule as to be completely irrelevant.
ReplyDelete2. I feel that our nutritional label is imperfect, but definitely still effective. I think some improvements should be made to the current label such as stating the country of origin for every ingredient in the food. Compared to the proposed labels in the article, I feel that a healthy and informed decision is more easily made with our current label due to the fact that it is simple to understand and familiar to us. However the bottom line is no matter how large or flashy a nutritional label is, if American's aren't educated on the importance of nutrition then the label will continue to go unnoticed.
I prefer Joey Brunelle's label. It is user friendly and features bold, simple language and colors. Of course changing labels will make a difference. Most people develop eating and exercise patterns during childhood. If labels feature words and colors that are easy for children to understand and compare, they will be more likely to investigate the contents and calories of their food. In addition to changing the label, we need to educate people about food labels and the impacts of ingredients on their own bodies and health.
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