Food Labelling Systems : Design and evaluation of what type of food products should be labelled and how

It might seem like an impossible task these days to find a food product withoutany unwanted additives or ingredients. Food packaging tends not to highlightthese ingredients and the consumer must spend a lot of time reading andcomparing the often poorly presented lists of ingredients and nutritional values.Food labelling systems are intended to minimise this unnecessaryinconvenience for the consumers.The purpose of this paper is to evaluate a number of current food labellingsystems and propose new alternative designs for the people of Auckland, NewZealand.The results show that the Aucklanders are in favour of a more comprehensiblefood labelling system. More than half of the questionnaire respondents (n=161)preferred a particularly visual and colourful design inspired by a traffic lightsystem, however, other proposed designs proved to be popular as well. Thisshows how complex it can be to design a food labelling system that can caterfor people’s individual preferences in such a broad target group, i.e. the foodconsumers. Based on the collected data, which in essence is the opinions andattitudes of the food consumer group, there is a clear desire for greatertransparency and duty of care from the food producers.