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Ask HN: What information would you like to see on product labels?

1 points by melomal ↗ HN
When I look at a product label, food and drinks especially, I just see legalese that's a requirement and no more. Some random competitions are sometimes also provided but overall labels are pretty boring.

What information would you like to see on a product label?

In my mind I have: ingredient information, producer information (farm details for example), CO2 production output, how recyclable are the materials based on a color scale.

10 comments

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readonthegoapp
Actual calories Added sugar Minimum font of 50 or whatever
melomal
When you say actual calories, what do you mean?

Sugar etc is all there to view and basically legally required.

Are there any other pieces of information that you would like to see?

plasma
I’m from Australia, I really like how we always show the 100g/100ml breakdown of ingredients, not just “serving size”.

This lets you easily compare across products with different sizes.

See https://www.wholekids.com.au/wp-content/uploads/australian-f...

melomal
This is brilliant! I even love the additional information added such as 'you don't have to avoid sugar completely' (are these coloured boxes also visible on the label or is it just for illustrative purposes?).
bttrfl
CO2 footprint would be nice, but CO2 isn't only environmental factor to consider. I'd rather have colour-coded stickers with two scales - absolute and relative within a product category.

A sticker on a diesel car would be RED/RED and a sticker on a tiny EV car would be RED/GREEN.

A sticker on an apple from a domestic market would be GREEN/GREEN and an apple imported from a country 1000s miles away would be GREEN/ORANGE.

Ideally, the labeling would be a reflection of a fiscal mechanism to charge for externalities in the entire chain - from production to a sale and disposal.

melomal
So it would definitely need to be category specific but I do think this could be a hugely interesting idea for organic products etc
bttrfl
I'd love a dual, absolute/category, scale to make my decisioning easier. If something is green on an absolute scale then it's a smaller problem if I pick a product labeled red on on category scale. But I do know that I shouldn't do that.

Dual scale would make it possible to differentiate between two similar products - an "eco" cotton bag could be orange/green while a single plastic use bag could green/red. This way every one would know that an eco bag is worse than a plastic one unless you use it a lot.

Finally, producers would be motivated to optimise environmental impact of all kinds of products because having a red label would be shameful.

melomal
The traffic light system is used in the UK to show how much sugar/salt/fat is in the product. To be honest it shocked me to see so much red for salt so it definitely was eye opening.

The issue with this, that I can now see, is that it would take government action to make this a requirement. But I can see that there would definitely be a benefit for education the customer.