Beetroots are blue

If you buy fruits and vegetables in five different colours you will have covered your need for vitamins and minerals.

It should be easy to choose healthy food when we shop in the supermarket. That is the opinion of Janni Svane Madsen who just graduated as a communication designer. In her project she challenges the traditional sales pattern of the retail trade, as well as the consumers’ shopping patterns. And as Janni Svane Madsen’s research shows it can be easy to buy healthy food. We have to be guided by colours.

If we buy fruits and vegetables in five colours (green, orange/yellow, red, white and blue/purple) we have covered our need in terms of vitamins and minerals.

- I want to make it easy for the whole family, who typically shop on their way home from work and kindergarten and are in a hurry, and everyone is tired. This system is so simple that even a child can understand it, and studies within my focus group show that the customers are thrilled with the model, Janni Svane Madsen explains. Some of the results of her research are based on American studies. The only thing consumers have to get used to is what colour code each fruit and vegetable belongs to, for example banana is white and beetroot and blueberries belong to the blue/purple category.

Price of vitamins
Janni Svane Madsen has collaborated with COOP, and in the second part of her graduation project she has re-designed the familiar price tags. Instead of focussing on price per unit weight she is concentrating on content of healthy ingredients. That means that the price tag for broccoli will indicate that it costs X number of kroner per mg of vitamin C, and thus consumers can choose the food where they will get the healthiest ingredients for their money.

Janni Svane Madsen has tested different types of price tags in a focus group in order to see what information the consumers prioritise when they shop, and on a number of displays the consumers were asked to choose between two types of price tags. Would they choose the cheap broccoli with the most amount of water, or the more expensive product, which had a larger content of vitamins and minerals.

- In my first experiments you could see whether vegetables were organic or conventional, but there are too many values associated with the two “brands”, so I chose to blur the production method to prevent consumer bias, says Jannie Svane Madsen.

The majority chose organic
The results from the focus groups were, however, that the organic products fared better than the conventional ones, and that will be a challenge if the designer’s new sales methods are going to catch on in a supermarket.

- Obviously a supermarket is keen not to favour individual manufacturers, so it is a challenge to design a model that the shops will use. But seen from the consumer’s perspective there is no doubt that she will find it much easier to choose healthy food items if the tag displays price per mg of vitamin rather than price per total weight, says Janni Svane Madsen, who is hopeful that her project will provide inspiration to the large supermarket chains.

I have wanted to create a project that creates a debate, and I also want to challenge the rules a little. I don’t understand why everyone does things the same way when at the same time we want people to eat healthier. Many shops have posters and long information banners focussing on healthy products, but when I speak to the shop managers I learn that very few customers actually read them. My design is much easier for the consumer to decipher, and I hope that there are shops that want to introduce it on a trial basis, says Janni Svane Madsen.

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