RETHINK THE FOOD LABEL

ABOUT:

Rethink the Food Label is a project by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism’s News21 program and Good Magazine. We asked the public, food thinkers, nutritionists, and designers to redesign the Nutrition Facts Label to make it easier to read and more useful to people who want to consume healthier, more nutritious and wholesome food.

Designs could incorporate the nutrition label’s existing break down of fats, sugars, vitamins, calorie counts and percent daily values. Or, they could re-imagine the label to include geography, food quality, food justice, carbon footprint, or lesser-known chemosensory characteristics.

Above all, we asked for designs that were informative, instructive and memorable.

THE OBJECTIVE:

Inspire better food and nutrition literacy with clear, simple, easy-to-understand labels.

JUDGES AND HIGHLIGHTS:

Our judges are Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Food Rules, Robert H. Lustig, M.D. is Professor of Clinical Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco, Michael Jacobson is the co-founder of the Center for Science in the Public Interest,  Andrew Vande Moere is Associate Professor at K.U. Leuven University, Belgium and founder of Information Aesthetics, and Laura Brunow Miner, designer and founder of Pictory.

We’ve also teamed up with Art Center College of Design’s Designmatters course on food and health. The class is working on a summer-long project to redesign the food label and rethink how design affects our food choices. They will be submitting redesigned nutrition labels but they will also take on larger design challenges, like how to reconfigure grocery stores and product packaging to promote healthy eating. We will highlight their final projects here in August.

THE COMPETITION:

Winners will be announced Monday July 25th.