This may come as a shock, but we’re not doctors. (Take a moment to collect yourself.)
Still, we’ve noticed a dramatic increase in food allergies over the past several years, often in ways that strike extremely close to home, from school bans on PB&J to white-knuckle trips to the ER. And while there are lots of theories about why these increases are occurring, there’s not a simple, easy-to-understand way for food allergy sufferers and their loved ones to to determine if what they’re buying is safe.
We think that’s crazy. Not to mention potentially dangerous. And, as far as food manufacturers are concerned, both irresponsible and shortsighted. Irresponsible because it almost certainly costs less to make a minor tweak to a package’s design than the fend off lawsuits from people who’ve been harmed by your product. And shortsighted because the absence of a coherent food allergy alert system means there’s a huge opportunity in the market to lead.
So why isn’t anyone leading? We can only assume it’s because food manufacturers everywhere are looking at the problem the wrong way around. That is, as just another design element that threatens to further limit marketing real estate as opposed to something that customers will see as a value-added service.
To help them, we took the first stab at a design solution; one that can be used and adapted by every company on every package of food they make without fundamentally changing those packages or significantly limiting otherwise usable space.
It identifies each of the eight food ingredients that account for an estimated 90% of allergic reactions with clean, unambiguous, universally understandable iconography. That’s especially important because so many people with food allergies are kids, who learn how to identify ‘bad’ ingredients before they can even read.
We thought long and hard about how to indicate ‘on’ and ‘off’ states (i.e. what is and isn’t in the package), and decided the combination of the words Allergy warning and full-strength icons was the simplest, clearest way.
And to ensure people have all the information they need, we added a QR code that could lead directly to either a company’s or independent, third-party site with complete food allergy info.
In a final push to encourage adoption, we showed how the system could be versioned to sync up with different package designs. (There’s precedent: Companies apply different colors, fonts and backgrounds to their nutrition information such as ground beef, soda, tea, & energy bars, so why not their food allergy details too?)
It’s not perfect, we know, but it’s a helluva lot better than what’s out there now, which is nothing. So let us know what you think, and we’ll make improvements.
In the meantime, we’ll be sending a link to this post to as many forward-thinking food company execs as possible to get this train moving. Feel free to do the same.
A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about 
In tests that were task-based (“Where would you click to see our services?”), we got great feedback that will help us re-label and create stronger visual cues. We’re very conscious of the balance that needs to be struck between how we view our own offerings, and how the general user on the web tends processes what we do. Eliminating organizational bias from labels can be hard, but ultimately it’s about usability, not pride.
