I'm not sure this is great visualization.<p>Firstly, trace ingredients are often what's important to the consumer. Fine, I know my peanut butter is mostly peanuts, but how much salt is there?<p>Secondly, these are simple examples. What do you do with, say, a can of chicken and vegetable and noodle soup, which could easily have thirty ingredients before you even start counting the potentially-nasty additives down in a tiny box in the corner.<p>Thirdly, apparently labellers aren't obliged to split up certain categories (eg broccoli, sugar snap peas, green beans and carrots are all in a single green square). So presumably this doesn't even solve the specified problem of not knowing how much white vs whole wheat is in your food -- why would you split up white and whole wheat into separate categories when beans and carrots are the same?
A few friends of mine built something similar. Loaded the USDA nutrition database in a dropdown, and scaled 24 vitamins, nutrients, calories, etc by recommended daily intake:<p><a href="http://exposedata.com/intake/foodpick.html" rel="nofollow">http://exposedata.com/intake/foodpick.html</a> (takes a minute to load)<p>Many people have told me an added layer of discovering foods with particular nutritional qualities (filtering, sorting) would be very appealing. A recommendation engine for food.<p>If you're looking to hack on the dataset, check out this JSON version:<p><a href="http://ashleyw.co.uk/project/food-nutrient-database" rel="nofollow">http://ashleyw.co.uk/project/food-nutrient-database</a>
This is pretty bad I think. The amount of substance by mass is nearly completely unimportant. Consider a package which has 99.999% Organic Apples and 0.001% Plutonium. But hey, it's 99.999% organic! Look at all that red!<p>Much better is a simple ordered list of ingredients, so we're not bamboozled into ignoring certain ingredients just because they're not the majority of the content. But wait, thats ... what we already have on our packaging? What good visualization!
The new food labelling in the UK is based on a traffic light principle and, imho seems to be clearer: <a href="http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44434000/jpg/_44434134_foodlabel203pa.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44434000/jpg/_44434134...</a><p>The problem with this exaple is that it's hard to see quickly what the key points are, since prominence is automatically given to higher scores, whether they're good or bad.
IMHO, the Nutrition Information box is actually a shining example of good design already. It is very, very legible and has a clear information hierarchy.