A step towards healthier choices by getting rid of the deceptive Nutrition Facts-label
By: Reinoud Schuijers
Tags: Technology, Lifestyle, Health, Food, Culture

The Alternative

Remember the traffic sings I mentioned earlier? Now imagine a food label that gets the most important things across first: health hazards, risk contributors, things to take into consideration. Don’t speed. Park here. Stop.

A label one can glance over to get a basic idea of what they’re putting in their body. And most importantly, a label that doesn’t need deciphering.

And then imagine being able to do this in a personalized way, so that the label is different for every individual, depending on their current health, how they are feeling, and maybe even genetics.

Such a label can exist — here’s the proposed design draft:

The proposed label — it’s deliberatly not beautiful — Product photos by Jorge Franganillo and Mae Mu

Breakdown

Let’s break down all of the design choices I made during the process, and how this lead to this proposal.

Let’s also quickly address how aesthetically pleasing the label is. It isn’t. Because, well, are traffic signs pretty? That’s why.

Keep what’s good

First and foremost, we’ve kept what was good. No need to reinvent the wheel, and we want to make sure to build on the recognizably of the current label.

Recognizable through uniformity — Helvetica stays;

Readable and clear, stripped of anything that’s of no use — concise;

It has a serious and official character;

Maximum contrast (mostly black and white).

Shape

We’ve also held on to the basic shape, which is a petty basic rectangle, preferably in portrait so that it nicely translates to smartphone screens in the future.

In addition, this rectangular shape allows us to easily stretch or contract the label vertically if there’s more (or less) information to be communicated.

Structure

When it comes to its structure, this is where most changes were made. We now prioritize the negative impacts of the food at the top of the label. These are most important to get across. The reasoning goes that skipping things that are bad to your diet has a way bigger positive impact than incorporating a few more good things.

Current lifestyle is in need of positive restriction, not addition.

It’s important to stress that people read from top to bottom. Taking into consideration the fact that not everyone reads the entire label, we can safely assume that the closer to the top certain information is, the more people it will reach.

In addition, the 2019 Food Labeling Survey found that 48% of US adults would be likely to look for symbols and icons to try to make better health choices.

Package symbols and icons are already being used by consumers to make healthy food purchase decisions, but consumers would be likely to use additional information if provided… …consumers agree that a symbol indicating whether a food is healthy would be very helpful (54%) and would make them more likely to purchase a product (45%).

The thing is, most types of food aren’t simply healthy or unhealthy. This depends on how often you consume them, how many servings you consume, and other factors like timing and pairing with other foods. So we can’t label a product as good or bad — but we can come close.

Category

All the way at the top of the label is the category. This is important because we want people to acknowledge what they are buying. By doing so, we bypass the possibly delusive image that a brand has created for their product. When buying energy drinks, for example, a person buying Red Bull does not feel as if he is buying a sugary, caffeinated and highly chemical soft drink. Instead, he feels as if he’s buying a sports drink.

We want to pull people back into reality by accurately naming (and indirectly shaming) the sort of product they are buying: Soft drink. Candy bar. Cabbage. Fast food.

I am aware that, in reality, the categorization would be a tremendously difficult feat, and many companies would try to have their products categorized differently. This is a problem of the future and, in all honesty, it’s partially the FDA’s problem to sort out.

Verdict

Right below the category is a one-line verdict. This verdict tells people whether or not the product fits into a healthy lifestyle. There are three options:

Contributes to a healthy lifestyle; Can be part of a healthy lifestyle; Is not part of a healthy lifestyle.

That’s it. This, too, will have many companies absolutely furious, and it will be very difficult to create the exact rules and guidelines for determining in what box a product fits. However, I am convinced that every type of food does fit perfectly into one of the three boxes.

To go into box one, a product must be completely free of concerning ingredients (more on that later). It also must be unprocessed and have a high nutritional value.

Box two, which will be by the box containing by far the most products, will contain all products that do have significant nutritional value (for instance high in protein, high in certain good fats, high in vitamins or minerals), or products that are very low in risk contributors. These are all the things that you shouldn’t be eating lots of every single day, but won’t directly harm you if you eat them every now and then.

Box three is dedicated to those products we don’t need at all. Sugary energy drinks, alcoholic drinks, highly processed foods, most types of candy, industrially made pastries. Stuff like that.

Note that by ‘do not need’ I am purely talking about humans metabolically requiring them. The label is only concerned with health — not with cultural standards or the occasional treat.

Concerning ingredients & notable facts

To me, this is the most interesting area of the label. Here, we will list every single risk contributor, and label them with a warning sign. Things like processed vegetable oils, added sugars, artificial sweeteners, caffeine, alcohol, and many, many more go into the left section.

Under Notable facts, we list everything that’s not necessarily bad, but that is, well, notable. This area might just as well contain positive attributes, for example, if a type of food is unprocessed or has very high nutritional value.

Other than that, we mention things like high macronutrient contents (fat, carbohydrates, and protein), whether or not something is organically grown, pasture-raised, free-range — stuff like that.

This allows the consumer to quickly see the most important aspects of a certain product, both positive and negative. In addition, I’ve chosen to simply mention certain facts (such as high carb or high-fat contents), without judging them, as these aren’t necessarily bad things, and their impact greatly varies on an individual basis.

Safety score

Another metric that will cause much debate. Diet is much like chemistry. Many chemical compounds don’t do much on their own. Yet, in combination with another substance, they might very well become explosive, highly toxic, or magically luminescent.

When it comes to diet, you can’t say that one food is bad and the other one is good, without zooming out and looking at the entire picture. What the rest of a person’s diet looks like greatly influences the (lack of) quality of a certain food within that bigger picture.

So we generally can’t just rate foods as “good” or “bad” for you. However, we can try to steer a person into subtly changing their entire food landscape.

That’s what this section is for. It gives the consumer a sense of how often a certain food can be safely enjoyed. Some foods are treats. You can have a treat maybe once a day, but preferably only every other day or so.

Other foods are staples. They are consumed daily, or even more than once a day. For these, we want people to resort to foods that are actually safe to eat a lot of. And that’s exactly what they can see by looking at the safety score.

To further help people make choices, we give them some guidance on how often they can safely enjoy a certain food:

0–25: better to avoid;

26–50: up to one serving per week;

41–70: up to three servings per week;

81–90: up to two servings per day;

91–100: up to three servings per day.

Serving size

Currently, the serving sizes on nutrition labels are a joke. However, we do need to guide the consumer, and inform them about how much of a certain food is considered a serving — and how many servings are in a container.

To do so, we will make the serving size more visual. For many recognizable container types, such as soda cans, bottles, and candy bars, we will use a stylized silhouette of the product to clearly depict how many servings are in the container.

For other foods, we will use shapes that slightly resemble the package, such as slightly rounded rectangular shapes, circles, and ovals.

This allows the consumer to visualize a serving, instead of having to guesstimate how many handfuls might or might not be in one serving.

Subsequently, this also painfully uncovers the absurdity of two servings being in a soda can, for example.

A note on serving sizes These should be pessimistically indicated. We currently base serving sizes on a 2,000 calorie diet. This is deceptive, because it leads to smaller serving sizes. The number 2,000 comes from the basic metabolic rate of an average woman. That means, the average woman needs approximately 2,000 calories per day to stay alive. However, that’s not what we eat in reality. We eat much more than that — women too. So we are basing our serving sizes on a desired number, not a realistic number. A smaller suggested serving size means that people think they’ll be having 1 or 2 servings, but in reality they are having 2 or 3. Instead, we should base our serving sizes on a 3,000 calorie diet — 50% higher, and a lot closer to how much we actually eat. This will increase the suggested serving size to be more realistic. A can of energy drink now becomes one serving, and so does a candy bar. A bag of crisps becomes three servings, instead of five or six. A head of cauliflower becomes two servings, instead of four.

Calories

All the way at the bottom, we find calories. This is a major change from the current label, where calories are presented as the single most important metric of a product.

The current nutrition facts label sends a wrong message, indicating that it doesn’t matter what types of food you eat, but it’s mostly about how many calories you consume.

However deceptive this is, calories do have meaning and are still a useful gauge for determining how much energy a product contains. Nevertheless, we cannot expect (and shouldn’t encourage per se) people to calorie-count, and we don’t want people to reason that high-calorie foods are always bad, and low-calorie foods are always good.

This is why the caloric value is included in the label, but not as prominently as before. We mention calories both per serving, and per 100 grams or milliliters. This way, a consumer can get an idea of how calorie-dense a certain food is, relatively.

What’s next

Redesigning food labeling is no small task. It’s not something I can do on my own. That is why I’ve started with a proposal — something to set things in motion, but far from an end result.

The main goal of this is not to become the designer of the new nutrition facts label, but rather to set something in motion.

I will now start collecting feedback and try to gain momentum. Everyone is welcome to weigh in and share their opinion. I will start reaching out to certain experts in different fields — graphic design, nutrition, behavioral change— and see where we to go from there.