Food Labelling: Proposed pictorial representations for sustainability scoring

This paper explores how sustainability could be represented on food labelling, depicting and balancing a range of sustainability factors such as fair trade, water use and carbon footprint, to give an overall score. The paper proposes a flower motif, with sustainability 'petals' to rate progress on the range of key themes.

Visually, traffic-light colour-coding helps consumers to make a rapid assessment of a product for its sustainability credentials. The colours are easy to read, as has been shown by trials of front-of-pack traffic-light nutrition labeling. Such at-a-glance labels have two important effects. Firstly, they help consumers make a rapid assessment of the relative merits of different products. And secondly, they make visible the information about sustainability performance of products, which has shown to be a great incentive for product makers to improve their score!