TThe tech industry has a new trend: adopting “transparency labels,” modeled after the iconic Nutrition Facts panel found on food packaging. In 2020, Apple introduced ‘Privacy Labels’ intended to reveal how apps handle user data. And that was just the beginning. Starting April 10, the FCC will require internet providers to include “Broadband Facts” labels detailing prices, speeds and data limits. Meanwhile, some policymakers and industry analysts have called for an “AI Nutrition Facts” label to clarify how artificial intelligence systems create content.
This rush to emulate the Nutrition Facts panel underscores the label’s status as the model for consumer transparency. Yet the history of how it achieved that status reveals the power – and limitations – of using such labels as a regulatory tool. They can inform consumers, but can also prevent more stringent regulations that are necessary to adequately safeguard the public interest.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) debated the proper way to protect consumers from misinformation and fear-mongering in health food markets. Initially, officials resisted labeling nutritional values on food, seeing it as unnecessary “quackery” or the discretion of medical specialists treating the sick.
But increasingly, the FDA had to balance the growing legitimate medical interest in using nutrition as a preventative public health solution, as well as the rise of a new self-improvement culture that was making Americans more health-conscious. FDA officials were also aware of declining public confidence in the government’s ability to make decisions for consumers about their private lives after years of scandals. This changed officials’ thinking, and they began to accept that Americans had the right — and perhaps even the need — to seek health information for food. They saw informational labels as a way to empower consumers to make their own choices, based on their own lifestyle, without FDA paternalism.
This new approach led to the introduction of a ‘Nutrition Information’ panel in 1973 to encourage the food industry to create healthier packaged options. Adding the label was only voluntary, but if companies wanted to actively promote a health claim or a food’s nutrients, they had to include it to balance their promotional messages.
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Although there was some media buzz, the bland design of the nutrition information panel had no visual impact. If anything, it has done more harm than good, as it paved the way for food companies to hype their products with dubious claims of health benefits. They focused on nutrition while hiding other information that could be crucial for consumers to make informed decisions, such as where food comes from and whether it has been processed.
This trend was exacerbated in the 1970s and 1980s when food companies bombarded consumers with difficult-to-decipher nutritional information. In 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 many of the labels they see.”
The confusing labels led to increasing calls for the FDA to update its nutrition labeling rules. In 1990, Congress passed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, which ultimately required the FDA to design a uniform nutrition label for all packaged foods. Over three years, the agency conducted extensive consumer research and stakeholder engagement with both the food industry and relevant consumer and health advocacy groups.
Unlike in 1973, this time officials also focused on the design of the label. They hired Greenfield Belser Ltd. in, a company that specialized in legal branding led by graphic designer Burkey Belser. According to Belser, FDA Commissioner David Kessler asked for his company’s help out of fear that the new label “wouldn’t look any different” and that no one would “know we even did anything.”
Belser, together with colleagues and policy experts, began reformatting the label’s layout and visual elements, shaping the now iconic design. They introduced indented subgroups and hairlines for readability. They used the Helvetica font because it was widely available, but also because it was easy to read. Most importantly, they gave the panel a bold title, “Nutrition Facts,” as well as black and white text, and they put a one-point line around the label. All these steps were aimed at clearly identifying the label as a separate part of the food packaging.
In an interview, Belser argued that the black box surrounding the label indicated that “manufacturers should not infringe on public property.” The bold title has helped make Nutrition Facts a “government brand.” Just a few years later, the FDA hired Belser to “extend the brand” and create a similar “Drug Facts” label for drug packaging.
The FDA launched a multi-million dollar public relations campaign to introduce the nutrition label. It included TV ads featuring celebrities – such as baseball star Roger Clemens and children’s favorite animated monkey, Curious George – educational materials distributed nationally to schools and doctors’ offices, and appearances on TV talk shows by FDA leadership. They praised the label’s ability to help Americans make healthier choices, live longer and better lives, and thereby reduce health care costs.
The label proved to be an instant hit with consumers and critics alike. In 1996, design critic Massimo Vignelli celebrated it as a triumph of socially responsible “information architecture” that perfectly linked form and function. The sleek layout of objective information contrasted with the ostentation and flash of colorful, biased food advertising.
The label seemed like a perfect solution. It allowed policymakers to encourage consumers and businesses to achieve their goals instead of implementing what lawyer Cass Sunstein – a fan of this new approach – called rigid “command and control” measures. The public and media praised its simplicity and clarity, and food manufacturers rushed to reformulate products to improve nutritional profiles.
Yet America’s public health crisis has only worsened over the past three decades as obesity, heart disease, and other diet-related diseases have continued to rise unchecked. Although well-intentioned, the Nutrition Facts label did not prove to be a panacea.
One problem was the resurgence of commercial messages that distorted nutritional facts through clever marketing. As the public education campaign associated with the new label came to an end, promotional health claims from food companies about nutritional information filled the void, easily overshadowing public health messages. The most obvious example of this was manufacturers and retailers’ front of pack designs designed to highlight specific nutritional facts for a product, often taking them out of context to make the food appear healthier than it was.
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Plagued by common prejudices – particularly the tendency to keep purchasing the same food product without knowing that it has changed or become less healthy – consumers also struggled to interpret labels holistically to create a balanced diet amid a sea of information. Furthermore, framing nutritional health as an individualized “choice” ignored deeper barriers to healthy eating, such as “food deserts” where obtaining fresh fruits and vegetables was impossible or the limitations that poverty placed on people’s food choices. For all its design talent, Nutrition Facts embraced a consumer empowerment ideology that was ill-equipped to address systemic harms.
Ultimately, perhaps the label’s biggest impact has been catalyzing food companies to reduce unhealthy nutrients, such as saturated fats and sodium, and promote healthier nutrients, such as fiber and protein, spurred by critical consumer research. But this had little to do with the knowledge gap the label was intended to address, and often manufacturers simply replaced one unhealthy ingredient with another.
This mixed legacy offers lessons as policymakers now consider solutions for transparency for technologies like AI, online privacy, and broadband.
Simple design and accessible information disclosure have undeniable value and political appeal. They can encourage industry responsibility and pressure to include public values in market options. However, labels alone are not sufficient to solve complex social issues. Their individualistic empowerment ethic ignores socio-economic barriers to entry. And their ‘intuitive’ design often obscures complex contextual nuances.
Most importantly, there is a real danger that disclosure of information will prevent deeper, stricter regulation that might be justified. As media scholar Michael Schudson has noted, “it offers government the least invasive action possible on a social problem.”
But before choosing that option, policymakers should assess whether such labeling can address key public concerns – from algorithmic bias to data commodification to affordable internet access. If not, stronger regulatory oversight may be needed, with labeling playing an educational support role rather than a standalone solution.
Arming consumers with education simply cannot take the place of asking whether certain industrial practices should be allowed in the first place. That’s the lesson of our most iconic information label.
Xaq Frohlich is an associate professor of technology history at Auburn University and author of From label to table: food regulation 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. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.