health-E

Health is one of the most important, if not the most important issues facing the UK population today. As part of my research, I have spent many hours looking into what is being done to encourage people to eat healthily and avoid serious disease as they get older. One of the main initiatives is the traffic light labelling system. However, it is certainly not perfect.

In fact, more than half of UK consumers think the nutritional information on food and drink packaging is hard for the average shopper to understand, and the same amount say they’d pay more attention to what’s in the products they buy if it was simpler. These are just two of the findings from a major and unique research study from The Chartered Institute of Marketing.

More than 2,000 UK consumers were surveyed about their attitudes towards healthy eating, food labelling and brand trust. The results clearly show that consumers want help – not just more information, but better information that’s clear, unambiguous, easy to understand and that gives them confidence in what they’re buying.

One of the biggest problems with the current Traffic Light, Front of Pack (FOP) labelling system is that it confuses shoppers in the way it shows the values of the nutrients that are present in the food product.

The simplistic character of the traffic light system might in certain instances create a misconception by the consumer.

The Red, Amber and Green swatches are relative to 100g of food and 100ml of drink.

The 100 gram/ml figure is arbitrary and misleading as rarely the portion size that a person eats is exactly that. It could be much higher or much lower. A system based on the portion size therefore in my opinion would be much more helpful.

Also the values that the ingredients are measured against are the “Required Intake” of an average adult – the values in fact are based on “an average woman”.

I believe that using a product like health-E can help to make understanding what food is really bad for you and which looks bad just at first glance.

health-E is a handheld device that alerts adults and children which foods are healthy simply by scanning the items barcode. The nutritional information of the food is displayed on the screen with a simple traffic light system. It is unique as the user selects their age group and gender and the information is then specific to them.

‍“consumers want help – not just more information, but better information that’s clear, unambiguous, easy to understand and that gives them confidence in what they’re buying.”