Tag Archives: Labels

FDA: Nutritional Facts Labels Go Digital

The FDA is considering new guidelines for Nutritional Facts Labeling.    The Nutritional Fact labels on foods and other goods under the FDA umbrella have a tremendous amount of details for the consumer, e.g. daily allowances, from vitamins to sodium.

Providing all of the Nutritional Fact details on the package is great, but how can we hope to track all of these data points to make sure we’ve achieved targeted daily goals.  Established diet systems, e.g. weight watchers, have suggested targets for calorie intake.  Some programs suggest counting Carbs.  All of these nutritional details are not only daunting to read, who would have time to track them? What facts are important to track?

Now the FDA is considering the requirement of adding a QR Code to our food Nutritional Facts labels.  If a consumer scanned the QR Code with their smart phone, they would have all of the Nutritional Fact details in digital form.  The digitized facts may then be imported into any smartphone app to monitor any of these values, and use the data to fit any 3rd party diet.  Monitoring food intake just got easier and more usable.  Alone, on a package of food, the Nutritional Facts are just data points, the digitized data can be easily integrated into our meal to meal consumption.   Furthermore, as these data points are analysed, and coordinated to other metrics, such as body weight, diets can become smarter, and even the FDA may make adjustments to the  daily allowances.  How many people really use these data points?