The words used in marketing can be fickle, and a term that your production and design team thinks is totally innocuous might prove to be more “loaded” than you first expected. When food labels are brought into the equation, it becomes necessary to determine what a certain term means. For example, let’s continue to examine the word “fortified,” and how shoppers might react when they see it.
Though it seems innocuous enough, this word denotes that vitamins are not inherently present in a product and have been added by the manufacturer to account for this. Some consumers might not know this, but seeing as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is, according to Politico, intending to examine these claims more closely, it’s likely that the food-buying populace could be paying more attention to this specific label.
In the text of its “announcement,” the FDA described how it wishes to test to see the effect that reading the claims of a food product being “fortified with nutrients” or vitamins has on rates of consumption.
“FDA, as part of its effort to promote public health, proposes to conduct a controlled, randomized experiment to explore consumer responses to expressed and implied nutrient content claims on the labels of snack foods such as cookies, carbonated beverages, and candy,” it reads. It wants to compare labels to see what different effect they have on opinions and purchasing choices.
As your customer base becomes more educated on the meaning of different terms, it’s important to spell out what you mean on your packaging, perhaps with the well-judged use of a color label printer.