TThe tech industry has a new trend: the adoption of “transparent labels” modeled after the iconic Nutrition Facts panel found on food packaging. In 2020, Apple introduced “Privacy Labels” that aim to explain how apps process user data. And that was just the beginning. Starting April 10, the FCC is requiring internet service providers to carry “Broadband Facts” labels detailing pricing, speeds and data limits. Meanwhile, some policymakers and industry analysts have called for the use of the “AI Nutrition Facts” label to clarify how AI systems create content.
The rush to emulate the Nutrition Facts panel underscores the label’s status as the go-to model for consumer transparency. But the history of how it achieved this status reveals the power and limitations of using such labels as a regulatory tool. They can inform consumers, but they can also forestall more serious regulations that are necessary to adequately protect the public interest.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) debated the proper way to protect consumers from misinformation and fearmongering in health food markets. Initially, authorities resisted nutritional labeling of foods, seeing it as unnecessary “quackery” or the purview of medical professionals treating patients.
But the FDA has increasingly had to weigh growing legitimate medical interest in the use of diet as a preventative solution to public health, as well as the rise of a new self-improvement culture that is making Americans more health-conscious. FDA officials were also aware that, after years of scandals, the government had waning confidence in its ability to make decisions about consumers’ private lives. This changed the way officials thought, and they began to recognize that Americans had the right, and perhaps even the need, to seek health information about food. They found that informative labels empowered consumers to make choices for themselves based on their lifestyle, without FDA paternalism.
This new approach led to the launch of a “Nutrition Information” panel in 1973 to encourage the food industry to produce healthier packaged options. Adding the label was only optional, but if companies wanted to actively promote a health claim or a food’s nutritional values, they had to include it to offset promotional claims.
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Although it generated media interest, the nutritional information panel’s simple design lacked visual impact. On the contrary, it probably did more harm than good, because it paved the way for food companies to hype their products with dubious claims about their health benefits. They focused on nutrition and suppressed other information vital for consumers to make informed decisions, such as where a food came from or whether it was processed.
This trend intensified during the 1970s and 1980s, when food companies buried consumers in difficult-to-understand nutritional information. By 1989, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis W. Sullivan was forced to admit that “consumers must be linguists, scientists, and mind readers to understand most of the labels they see.”
Confusing labels have led to growing calls for the FDA to update its nutrition labeling rules. In 1990, Congress passed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, which eventually required the FDA to design a uniform nutrition label for all packaged foods. The agency has conducted extensive consumer research and stakeholder outreach with both the food industry and relevant consumer and health interest groups over three years.
Unlike 1973, this time the authorities also focused on the design of the label. They hired Greenfield Belser Ltd., a firm specializing in legal branding headed by graphic designer Burkey Belser. According to Belser, FDA Commissioner David Kessler asked his firm for help out of fear that the new label “wouldn’t look any different” and no one would “even know we did anything.”
Working with colleagues and policy experts, Belser began reformatting the label’s layout and visual elements to shape its now-iconic design. They added indented subgroups and thin lines for readability. They used the Helvetica font because it was widely available and also easy to read. Most importantly, they titled the panel “Nutrition Facts” in bold letters alongside black and white text, and put a one-point rule around the label. All these moves were aimed at clearly defining the label as a separate element of food packaging.
In an interview, Belser argued that the black box around the label signals that “manufacturers cannot encroach on public property.” The boldface title helped turn Nutrition Facts into a “government brand.” In fact, just a few years later, the FDA hired Belser to “expand the brand” and create a similar “Drug Facts” label for drug packaging.
The FDA launched a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign to promote the nutrition label. This included TV commercials featuring celebrities like baseball star Roger Clemens and children’s favorite animated monkey Curious George, educational materials distributed to schools and doctors’ offices across the country, and appearances by FDA leadership on TV talk shows. They touted the label’s ability to help Americans make healthier choices, live longer and better, and therefore reduce health care costs.
The label was an immediate hit with consumers and critics alike. By 1996, design critic Massimo Vignelli was celebrating it as a triumph of socially responsible “information architecture” that perfectly combined form and function. The clean layout of objective information contrasted with the glitz and shine of colorful, biased food ads.
The label seemed like the perfect solution. This allowed policymakers to direct consumers and businesses to meet targets rather than enacting what legal expert Cass Sunstein, a fan of this new approach, described as strict “command and control” measures. The public and media praised the product’s simplicity and straightforwardness, and food manufacturers scrambled to reformulate products to improve their nutritional profiles.
But America’s public health crisis has deepened further over the past 30 years, with the uncontrolled rise of obesity, heart disease, and other diet-related diseases. Although well-intentioned, the Nutrition Facts label has proven not to be a panacea.
One problem was the resurgence of commercial messages that distort nutrition facts through clever marketing. Once the public education campaign tied to the new label ended, food companies’ health promotional claims regarding nutritional information filled the void and easily overshadowed public health messages. The clearest example of this was front-of-pack labeling, which manufacturers and retailers developed to highlight specific nutritional values for a product, often taking them out of context to make a food appear healthier than it actually is.
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Frustrated by common biases (most importantly, the tendency to continue purchasing the same food product without realizing that it has changed or become less healthy), consumers have also found it difficult to interpret labels holistically to create a balanced diet amid the sea of information. Moreover, framing nutritional health as an individualized “choice” ignored deeper barriers to healthy eating, such as “food deserts” where it is impossible to buy fresh fruits and vegetables, or the restrictions that poverty places on people’s food choices. For all its design prowess, Nutrition Facts espoused an ideology of empowering the consumer, ill-equipped to address systemic disadvantages.
Ultimately, the label’s biggest impact may have been a catalyst for food companies to reduce unhealthy nutrients like saturated fats and sodium and increase healthier nutrients like fiber and protein, spurred by consumer reviews. But this had little to do with the lack of knowledge that the label was invented to solve, and often manufacturers simply substituted one unhealthy ingredient for another.
This mixed legacy offers lessons as policymakers now consider transparency fixes for technologies such as artificial intelligence, online privacy and broadband.
Simple design and accessible information disclosures have undeniable value and political appeal. They can catalyze industry accountability and create pressure to incorporate public values into market options. But labels alone are not enough to solve complex social problems. Individualist “empowerment” ethics ignore socioeconomic barriers to access. And their “intuitive” designs often overlook complex contextual nuances.
Crucially, there is a danger that disclosing information risks circumventing deeper and stricter regulation that might be warranted. As media scholar Michael Schudson observes, “this gives the government the least intrusive action possible on some social problems.”
But before choosing this option, policymakers need to consider whether such labeling can address key public concerns, from algorithmic bias to data commoditization to affordable internet access. Otherwise, stronger regulatory oversight may be required, with labeling playing an educational support role rather than a stand-alone solution.
Arming consumers with education is no substitute for asking whether certain industry practices should be permitted in the first place. That’s the lesson of our most iconic tagline.
Xaq Frohlich is an associate professor of history of technology at Auburn University and the author of: From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Read more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of TIME editors.