It’s not enough to provide the proper nutrition information when it comes to food labels—your consumers need to believe that you are being honest about what goes into your food. Now is a time when shoppers have every reason to be skeptical of official health mandates and look for better assurance of health properties.
An article on Salon recently described the problem of relying on nutrition information. But, as this blog has pointed out, mandated labels aren’t always 100 percent accurate, and weeks filled with missing calories could add up quickly before a person realizes. To counter this and further gain a consumer’s loyalty, food producers, especially for smaller brands, can make their own ingredient labels or stickers that assure customers of their contents, while also making labels that follow official regulations.
In the Salon piece, author Jill Richardson uses the example of two breakfast cereals to describe how these labels are ambiguous and can lead to misguided decisions. Richardson points out that a box of Count Chocula is described as having more vitamins in a serving than Grape Nuts, and while this is technically true, it might cause consumers to make wrong assumptions.
“Because the ingredients are nutritionally lacking, the manufacturers fortify them with most of the vitamins and minerals they contain,” Richardson writes.
Other food producers can use their own, in-house labels to describe the properties of a product line as clearly as possible. Different terms may have meanings that shoppers are unaware of, and it’s important to make sure that these other interpretations aren’t lost on a customer base.