Packaging

[supergee]

“100% cheese” doesn’t have to be 100% cheese

Thanx to andrewducker

Comments

[arlie]

The other problem, of course, is whether the ingredients list is legible - not only for someone with perfect (corrected) vision in perfect lighting, but for a person with some level of vision issues (not total blindness) in normal grocery store conditions. It's commonly written in quite small print - sometimes also low contrast and/or crumpled and/or hidden by other packaging or labelling elements. Can the ingredients be read after cataract surgery? Before cataract surgery? By someone who can't afford new eyeglasses as often as their prescription changes? By someone who's just a bit dyslexic?

My anecdotal experience is that I rarely get through a grocery trip without having difficulty reading something - though that's most often tags on the shelf, particularly the fine print identifying which package the rather larger-written price applies to. (And then there's unit pricing, where a given section generally has at least 3 different units used for differing products, making actual comparison require a calculator and probably a unit conversion table as well. All of those in the same hard to read font, often low enough I need to pretty much lie on the floor to read it.)

[marahmarie]

Same here, I can't read 9 out of 10 food or beverage labels without glasses (astigmatism), and for a fact I can't read the ingredient list on a Parmesan cheese bottle (or the unit pricing, most of the time) without my glasses, so I get what you're saying (not so much lying on the floor as holding the item out at a weird angle and away from me, or with unit pricing, hunching down to get the shelf label more at eye level, then turning my head in all kinds of ways to find the right light and angle).

If something identified as 100% something is not, they should list it on the front of the label in a font/color/with contrast that makes it easy to find and read. But this gets me off onto a whole tangent about accessibility in labeling, which is pretty much MIA.