Redesigning Nutrition Labels Using a Meal-based Approach

1 THE ISSUE
Over the last couple of decades we have seen a significant increase in the number of calorie-conscious consumers. People more so than ever before, care about the amount of calories they take every day through home-made and pre-packaged foods. Although people try to estimate the amount of calories they are taking by eating home-made meals using ingredient based estimates, the same process is made easier for pre-packaged foods by taking the guess-work out of the equation using the nutrition labels.

The nutrition labels provide a wealth of information regarding the packaged food, including not just the amount of calories but also breakdown of basic nutritional elements, vitamins and minerals. The nutrition labels that are currently used provide these information based on a seemingly-arbitrarily defined amount of servings. In theory, the serving information allows a consumer to know how many calories they would be getting by consuming the suggested amount of the food in question. However, sometimes the definition of a single serving doesnt match the reality which can sometimes be very frustrating for the consumer. So, my question is: Would it be better if we provide nutritional information based on standardized meals instead of arbitrarily defined servings? Would a simple switch like this make it easier for a consumer to identify calorie-packed and/or nutrition-packed foods?

2 MEAL-BASED VS. SERVING-BASED

The serving based approach provides an answer to a weird question (assuming that we are interested in calories in this case): How many calories would you be getting if you consume the amount we deemed appropriate for consumption for this particular food? It is known that the serving sizes differ greatly between different foods. Even though the serving size might be standardized for same type of food (e.g. pasta vs. pasta), it can be very different between different but comparable types (e.g. pasta vs. rice). Given this, how does the serving based nutrition label make it easier for us to decide between two comparable items? It really doesnt. The meal based approach that I will be exploring is a different take on this calculation. With the meal based approach, the question is not How many calories would I get in a serving but a more relatable one: How much of this item do you need to consume in order to get one meals worth of calories? Notice that there is still a pre-defined notion of one meal in this case. However, unlike the serving which can change between different types of foods, a meal can be standardized across all types of food. Even today, the nutrition labels provide % daily value information based on a standardized 2000 calorie diet. Given that there is already a standardized daily calorie consumption, we need to define the number of meals per day in order to get a standardized one meal. For the purpose of this redesign, I will define this number as 3 (breakfast, lunch, dinner). The right number could be subject for further research (it is hard to pin down the right number of meals). To make things slightly easier, Ill assume a 2100 calorie diet thus defining each meal to be exactly 700 calories. Note that, while I am mostly focusing on calories in my examples to keep them simple, basic nutritional elements (which are also already standardized) can also be divided by the same number of meals to get a per-meal number for each of them.

3 RELATED READINGS
While I am not aware of any HCI related design or research that can be related to the subject at hand, I do have a real-world example that is based on a similar question: The MPG Illusion http://nsmn1.uh.edu/dgraur/niv/theMPGIllusion.pdf Why We Should Measure by Gallons per Mile, Not Miles per Gallon http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/news/4324986 The idea these articles and paper explore is also based on the question that if an operand switch (miles/gallon gallon/miles vs. calories/amount amount/calories) could make things easier for people to understand and compare different products.

Even the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently started requiring the Fuel Consumption Rate (gallons per 100 miles) on Fuel Economy Labels. (http://www.epa.gov/otaq/carlabel/gaslabelreadmore.htm#5)

4 THE REDESIGN
Lets start with an example standard nutrition label:

The current design follows the following pattern: 1. Identify the serving size 2. Identify the number of servings in this container 3. Provide calories and nutritional amounts and percentages for this serving amount Now, lets identify the main pattern that the new design needs to follow: 1. Remind the standard meal definition (similar to the note at the bottom of the current design) 2. Identify the amount needed to consume to cover a meal 3. Provide calories and nutritional amounts and percentages for that amount So, according to the new pattern we just defined, the most critical change seems to be how we convey the meal information to the consumer. Lets take an initial shot at redesigning the label roughly just by replacing text:

This may not work as well as we hope since the definition of a meal is very different than definition of serving information, in terms of the approach each one is taking for the calculation. A better way to display what a meal means can be this:

This is looking slightly better. It identifies what a meal is more clearly and puts the focus on the changed perception. Now that we provided the meal information, lets work on streamlining the rest of the information a little:

This is definitely easier to read. Now that we covered the basic framework, can we improved upon this to make the information that the consumer most cares about easily identifiable? How about color coding nutritional elements that this food provides ideally assuming a 3 meal consumption? Basically, the % values closer to 33% are considered ideal. A 3 meal consumption of a single type of food is definitely not be ideal, but a food providing 33% of a nutritional elements daily need would play nice with other types of food, compared to a food which provides, say, 50% of daily value. For example, if an item has a lot of green percentages, without looking at the exact numbers, we can deduce that it is a decent source of various nutritional elements to consume in a single meal (checkout the Soylent project for good example of this). Remember, our goal is to have consumers get the information they initially care about as quickly as possible using a new calculation approach. Code: % Value 05 5 25 25 40 40 90 90+ Color Code Red Yellow Green Yellow Red

Okay. We are getting somewhere. I still feel like we can improve one more thing on this design, again by changing a metric and making it more relatable. The question is: Why are we using percentages? The percentages are a good way to let consumer know how much of a daily needed amount of a certain element this food item covers. This information is useful when we are considering a food item in and of itself. However, with the question that Im exploring, we are designing the label around the scenario where this item covers for a meal. If thats the case, the percentage doesnt really make much sense. How about we let consumer know, directly, how many meals of this item they need to consume to get the full amount of daily need? Maybe a better approach is times information. Lets see:

Looks good. So, since my iterations are over for now, lets clear up the labels, remove the now extra information and finalize the design:

5 ADVANTAGES
The main reason I decided to explore the concept of meal based nutrition information was that consumers today can easily think a certain type of food doesnt have that much calories due to the abstraction provided by the arbitrarily defined idea of a serving. My approach, while being far from perfect, standardizes the information format across food items and provides a more common framework to make a decision. With meal-based nutrition labels, a consumer can compare calorie-density of the Big Mac sandwich and a bottle of Coke. With the current labels, this comparison is almost a mathematical problems. How can you compare two items where ones nutrition values are based on number of sandwiches, while the others is on milileters? To summarize, this new design could provide the following information as quickly as possible: How much of this item is too much for me to eat? A sandwich thats a 1000 calories? Thats almost 1.5 meals! No way Im eating that! Is it better for me to eat this ice cream bar, or that bottle of iced tea? Okay. I can drink 3 bottles of this iced tea before I go beyond my meal calories, but I can only eat one ice cream bar and Im done? Ill go with iced tea I have a lot of work to do today, so Im not going to bother with variety. How many of this small vegie pizza would it take for me to cover my daily needs?

6 CONCLUSION
In this redesign, I tried to explore the idea of reversing the way the calculations are done for nutrition labels and see if this different approach can make it easier for a consumer to get certain types of information more quickly. Overall, I think this reversal of units can be a very interesting concept to explore further. Like the MPG information, the current design of nutrition labels make it slightly hard to get certain types of information (such as calorie-density) hard to figure out which sometimes allow consumers to be fooled into thinking a calorie-packed food as not so bad. If we can make calorie-packed foods more obviously identifiable, even across different types, it might have a positive effect on consumers and make their lives slightly easier. Im well aware that this approach has its limitations. However, the purpose of this redesign wasnt really to flesh out a production ready standard, but explore an idea. So, Ill leave figuring out the negatives as an exercise for the readers.