The need to read the nutritional panel on supermarket products is an often heard message from Choice and health ‘experts.’ But has anyone tried reading them? The details are easy to follow but the font is so small that I have come to assume that the manufacturer doesn’t want me to read it!
I don’t wear glasses and get my eyes checked, but I now find myself taking a photo of the panels and zooming in! Its is crazy. More often than often not thought, I simply walk away.
Anyone else find this? Is there a legal size for the information which I understand to be compulsory on packaged food products ? It’s all very well to say choose carefully, but if this is our best guide, surely it needs to be humanly legible.
@keepcalm unfortunately the food standard that covers the legibility of food labels doesn’t prescribe a type size. The standard just requires the text to be legible.
Please send us pictures of products where this is a problem, it’s great for us to have examples!
Not only nutritional information, but cooking instructions are ridiculously small for some products. We have a very large magnifying glass in the kitchen for just such an emergency and use it at least once a week.
As well as the font size, I have also been prevented from / struggled to read the details by bad colour combinations - like green text on a yellow background. I need to start carrying reading glasses.
Being able to read labels was one of the marvellous discoveries I made after having had cataract surgery - but one shouldn’t have to go to that extreme to get information.
I must say that I do agree with you.
One would think that if they wish the customer to be aware of the benefits of their product that they would want them to be
able to read the label clearly!
Thankfully I am still able to read all of the small writing without glasses, but at 49 years of age I fear my good fortune will not last much longer.
Cheers Natalie
How many products supply this information in a print size to small to read. And or print in a colour that does not have good contrast against the labour colour appears deliberate to me. Should we ask our Choice magazine to assist in remedying this after all this info is there to assist with healthy choices.
When getting my reading glasses out of my backpack still doesn’t make what is printed on the packet readable I resort to using my mobile phone …
I started with just the camera function but now I use a Magnifier app
But sometimes even that approach does not work - by the time text is big enough to read on the screen you are so “zoomed into the image” that you cannot tell where you are looking in the rows and columns of the nutritional panel; or the ingredients list.
