This traffic light supermarket receipt aims to make healthy shopping easy
By Sam Downing|
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You buy your groceries at the supermarket and, instead of ignoring and screwing up the shopping receipt, you scan it for a quick nutritional tally of everything you've just bought.
That's the idea behind a traffic light supermarket receipt that adds up the total calories, sugar, fat, and salt in your purchases and scores them green for "good", amber for "so-so" and red for "rethink your food choices ASAP".
Allowing people to instantly gauge the nutrition value of what they've bought could "revolutionise" food shopping, say nutrition academics backing the system.
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"Current evidence suggests that whilst consumers generally find the traffic light nutrition labelling useful, there are limitations, particularly when considering a person’s overall nutritional intake," said University of Birmingham sport and exercise nutrition lecturer Matthew Cole in a statement,
"A new receipt-based system could bridge this gap, and provide an additional tool to help aid consumers in their food purchases, providing an overall summary of their entire food purchases."
Cole's research suggests that a traffic light receipt summary would help most shoppers make healthier purchasing decisions, which most say is their key consideration in the supermarket.
The traffic light receipts are the work of designer Hayden Peek, who crafted them in 2016 with the aim of "trying to solve the obesity epidemic".
"With this information, the complexity of the issue is dismantled and in one simple graphic anybody can get a good idea of how healthy their diet is," he said, reported Dezeen.
Unlike Australia, which uses a (controversial) health star rating system to snapshot food's nutritional value, the United Kingdom already uses a traffic light system on individual packaging.
Several peak health bodies, including the Australian Medical Association and the Cancer Council, have backed the traffic light system as the most easiest and most effective way of labelling food, a position backed up by many researchers.
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