When the Nutri­tion Facts pan­el first appeared on food pack­ages approx­i­mate­ly 20 years ago, it for­ev­er changed the back of the food pack­age. Every food prod­uct large and small was required to dis­play the now-famil­iar Nutri­tion Facts box with its reg­u­la­tion size, lay­out and Hel­veti­ca font.

The pur­pose of Nutri­tion Facts is to help peo­ple make health­i­er food choic­es. But in the 20 years since the pan­els made their debut, nutri­tion in Amer­i­ca has not improved. Even more of us are over­weight, we still don’t have a clue about por­tion sizes, and bat­tles over ingre­di­ents like sug­ar con­tin­ue to grab head­lines. So the gov­ern­ment decid­ed that it’s time for a Nutri­tion Facts pan­el facelift. The pro­posed new look means new work for those of us in the food label busi­ness.

Food Labels

Here’s a look at what has changed:

The Calo­ries font is much big­ger so that the num­ber of calo­ries per serv­ing is easy to see … and hope­ful­ly pay atten­tion to. Serv­ings per con­tain­er also bulked up in size – this is to dis­cour­age peo­ple from eat­ing the whole bag of chips or car­ton of ice cream with­out at least know­ing that it’s more than one serv­ing. The Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion (FDA) is adjust­ing its Serv­ing size stan­dards to bet­ter reflect the amounts of par­tic­u­lar types of foods and bev­er­ages that peo­ple actu­al­ly eat or drink. Calo­ries from Fat will be removed because the type of fat affects health more than the num­ber of fat calo­ries. The mid­dle of the label has a new look, with Dai­ly Val­ues mov­ing to the left side of the pan­el. Added Sug­ars is a new list­ing that may or may not make the final cut, depend­ing on which side of the sug­ar argu­ment sways the FDA. Below the thick divid­ing line are two min­er­als that appear on the old label, cal­ci­um and iron, and two new nutri­ents linked to long-term health, vit­a­min D and potas­si­um, that take the place of vit­a­mins A and C. Gov­ern­ment sur­veys show that Amer­i­cans do not get enough vit­a­min D and potas­si­um in their diet but gen­er­al­ly are not defi­cient in A and C. Amount and per­cent Dai­ly Val­ue will be required.

The new label for­mat means that food com­pa­nies, at a min­i­mum, have to pro­vide their label design team with per serv­ing infor­ma­tion on the three new list­ings: added sug­ars, vit­a­min D and potas­si­um. This may require either lab­o­ra­to­ry or com­put­er­ized nutri­tion analy­sis for the two nutri­ents and recipe cal­cu­la­tions for added sug­ars.

Once the Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion (FDA), releas­es the final label for­mat in the ear­ly fall of 2014, food com­pa­nies will have up to two years to change their labels. Many are like­ly to adopt the new Nutri­tion Facts pan­el for­mat as quick­ly as they can gath­er nutri­tion infor­ma­tion and turn it over to their graph­ic design­ers.