My colleague Debra pointed out an interesting article on how some grocery chains were adopting their own nutrition labeling schemes.
The Wall Street Journal piece featured Supervalu’s system of color coded tags to indicate healthy items. Without claiming to have any branding or visual design expertise, there’s an obvious appeal to using bright colors. But doesn’t associating a red tag with items low in saturated fat run into some color cues problems? On the one hand, kids these days are learning to eat the rainbow- and red foods like strawberries and apples and peppers are good for you.
But red also means stop and danger. When we were researching Tesco/ Fresh & EAsy Neighborhood Markets, we ran across the British Government’s ‘traffic light’ food labels, with green for healthy, orange/yellow for caution, and red for stop/unhealthy based on fat, sugar, and salt content. Tesco and some other stores were bypassing the traffic light scheme in favor of a more numerical, content listing approach. Perhaps they didn’t want to offend any of their supplier. Margo Wootan from Center for Science in the Public Interest makes the same point in the WSJ article about the lack of a ‘warning’ or ‘limit intake’ kind of symbol in the Supervalu approach:
“Healthy eating is about both choosing healthy foods and … limiting unhealthy foods.”
This would seem consistent with my sense of how nutrition labeling in restaurants can work. Part of the usefulness is creating distinctions between healthier and less healthy items, which, while consumers are free to ignore, allows a choice. Otherwise a labelling scheme can seem like just another promotion; the blue light special of nutritional reminders.
It will be be worth seeing if any evidence comes out about the effectiveness of different labeling programs or if the government tries to move stores towards one consistent label (which could help – or water things down knowing how industry can influence bureaucracies).
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