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 U.S. 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 News21 fellow, 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 food writer Michael Pollan, consumer health activist Michael Jacobson, San Francisco pediatrician Dr. Robert Lustig, San Francisco graphic designer Laura Brunow Miner and Belgian design professor Andrew Vande Moere.
The winning entry, from 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 power bar. 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, 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 Dylan 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. … 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 none of the designs received a complete endorsement from the judges, they noted that each label offered some improvement over the current food label. Other concerns, such as 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 submission, 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 mid-day Sunday and announce the winner next week. Visitors to the site can also view a slideshow of all the submitted designs.
