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MoHK and Food Label
Originally a hypothetical e-commerce design exercise, the Milk of Human Kindness (MoHK) project has really blossomed into one of my all-time favorite pieces. Starting as an imaginary oat milk brand, I used the MoHK project as a springboard into the world of production art. Sometime after I had presented the MoHK piece, I became enamored by the design of food labels. I wanted to do an exploratory project, endeavoring to improve the readability and usefulness of food labels—at least in the US.
Process
During my research, I found that typographical hierarchy and contrast are very important to the efficiency of the design. To suit the needs of any packaging, the label can be shrunk, abbreviated, and split in any way while retaining all the necessary nutrition facts. Maintaining this modularity is important to the feasibility of any future designs. A lot of re-designs try to use a variety of symbols and iconography to break up all the text. Some labels looked good on their own but would prove hard to adapt to the multitude of formats that food products necessitate. Additionally, color coding is often used, which in my opinion, would just make branding on the part of the manufacturer a frustrating endeavor. A notable inclusion I often saw attempted to rate the quality of food items, usually with a letter grade (A for good and F for bad—that kind of thing). While I like the idea of pressuring companies into making healthier and more responsible products, I think this would ultimately hurt the consumer experience by effectively shaming people for choosing items that are rated F or similarly "bad." It may be useful for bulk consumption of an "unhealthy" item, but when you feel fine after having one can of Coke or something, it makes the bad rating seem obsolete or even untrustable—something to ignore. In my subsequent exploration, including parsing through all 132 pages of the official FDA labeling guidelines (which is formatted in a strange Q&A-type format), I iterated on many prototypes until I found something adaptable and concise. I found that paying attention to contrast and hierarchy was the most important in allowing it to be so modular. I'll explain what I landed on here in a sec, but first, it's important to note why I made the decision to iterate upon the existing label framework instead of making something entirely new. For one, it is already familiar to both manufacturers and consumers. Building on top of this instead of scrapping it for something like food classifications is both backed by science and doesn't require total re-education to understand. It is simply not realistic to expect consumers to learn about the multitudes of classifications, including the chemical origin and makeup, the significance of a nutrient's mass, its function in the body, or the difference between monosaccharide glucose and disaccharide sucrose. The existing partition of nutrient facts we use today is quite satisfactory to our dietary and nutritional needs. Specific claims already have to be disclosed on the Nutrition Panel as per FDA guidelines and can be improved, as I will now show you The first notable change I made attempted to improve overall readability, especially for low-vision readers. I use Atkinson Hyperlegible, a free font from the Braille Institute and one of my favorite fonts at the moment. Atkinson Hyperlegible is a beautiful and thoughtful gift to the world thanks to a partnership with Applied Design Works, and it continues to be recognized for its accessibility. However, food labels are not required to conform to any specific typeface. Helvetica is the current standard, though "any legible type style may be used." This would still apply to my adaptation.
Evolution of the Design:
Nutrition Label:
1. Calories are a pretty decent metric of importance, but it doesn't tell enough of the story concerning how food interacts with our bodies. The proliferation of diabetes in America shows we need to be paying more attention to the effect food has on our health. Foods high in refined carbs and sugar are digested more quickly and often highly impact blood sugar levels, while foods high in protein, fat, or fiber typically have a low impact. We use the measure of this impact to calculate a specific food's Glycemic Index. Glycemic Load simply factors in the number of carbs in a serving to determine how it affects blood sugar levels (GL = GI * carbs / 100).
2. The ingredients list remains largely the same, though the safety evaluation of any included chemical or substance must be disclosed. Currently, as found on fda.gov, "any substance that is intentionally added to food is a food additive, [which] is subject to premarket review and approval by FDA unless the substance is generally regarded as safe under conditions of its intended use..." I found that it is very easy to overcrowd the ingredients list by trying to explain the roles different chemicals and substances have in any given product. Nutrition Label guidelines already state that some ingredients necessitate descriptive language to indicate what it is used for, though this could certainly be improved in the future. More important ingredient warnings like artificial colorings ought to be handled by the federal government in this case, similar to how European countries have outright banned certain ingredients from being used.
3. By far, the biggest change involves a panel of reliable claims in the form of standardized iconography. There are two sections; the main section includes three persistent icons, whose relative contrast serves as boolean operants of disclosure. Basically, if the condition applies to any particular item, the icon is fully shaded and must have a WCAG color contrast ratio greater than or equal to 10:1, though 21:1 is obviously preferred. A negative declaration means the icon is still present, but its contrast is greatly reduced to discern the difference, and to convey it does not apply to that specific item. The goal of these required disclosures, aside from the primary objective to improve readability, even at a glance, is to accommodate the growing and just culture of accountability and agency in consumption. This was challenging to define, but I'll describe the three values here:
- Humane Labor, in an affirmative declaration, signifies that all workers involved in any and all stages of production are paid fairly for their labor. This essentially pressures companies away from using the cheapest possible production, because that usually involves paying workers little to nothing for their labor. For example, my oat milk brand would be able to claim it uses humane labor, whereas companies like Nestle, Coke, or Starbucks (or most other coffee distributors) cannot do so, since they use slave labor (incarcerated or otherwise) to harvest their goods in impoverished countries.
- The vegan status of a food item, in an affirmative case, guarantees that no aspect of production operated on the oppression of non-human animals. Human survival has been contingent upon our relationship to food and to land. When land becomes too costly for the economics of agribusiness, the comfort of the animals being raised in farms declines to the point of torture. For too long we have treated the other animals of the Earth like sub-human creatures—they're not. Humanity has no moral claim over their lives. Whether or not all this can be done ethically on a global scale is another topic, but pressuring companies to vastly improve the well-being of their animals, and in turn educating the public about the horrors of our dietary lifestyles, along with breaking up the oligopolistic control of the US market, is the main goal here.
- Sustainable Production is admittedly the hardest to specify but is nevertheless culturally and environmentally significant. In an ideal world, being "carbon neutral" or "carbon negative" might suffice, but there are currently far too many ways for companies to claim they operate neutrally while still committing egregious acts of environmental terrorism. Instead, there will need to be a reliable way to quantify the ecological and environmental impact of a product. This would place greater social pressure on companies to find innovative solutions to their energy consumption and waste generation. More so, this awareness inherently favors local businesses and helps communities see the unsustainable nature of super-corporations and their over-production of goods and subsequent exploitation of local resources.
4. The section below the required icons are voluntary disclosure claims. "Voluntary" is a bit misleading, for there are a lot of over-arching rules and exceptions requiring disclosure of what is used in products, but it is the verbiage that the FDA uses in their guidelines. Ultimately, this section mainly represents allergy and dietary/religious restriction warnings. Crucially though, these icons need only appear in an affirmative state. If it doesn't apply to the product, no disclosure is necessary.
As you can see, this framework is highly adaptable, as per existing guidelines. The iconography is succinct enough to still be meaningful even on a tiny drink mix packet. The panels of the Nutrition Label can be in any order and still remain cohesive. On the dairy milk jug, you can get a better look at how the required icons function.
The FDA currently lacks the resources to check these claims, so lets just say along with the label change is policy change allowing people to sue for falsifying their label data. The main point is the exercise itself.
The great thing about the nature of this project is in the discovery and experimentation. All of this is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0), which means anyone is free to share and adapt the work under the same license with attribution. If you have anything you want to add, try, or pitch, be my guest! I've packaged all my files including the renders and imagery, which are all freely available on my GitHub! Thanks so much for your attention and take it sleazy.
