The UX Failure in the Candy Aisle
- John Mugumya
- Mar 15
- 5 min read
Why food packaging is designed to confuse and not to communicate
The conversation around food, what we eat and why we eat, has shifted. When I was younger, we ate whatever was put in front of us. Now, my 8-year-old interrogates every snack. They still love ice cream, candy, and cereal, but they ask questions about ingredients I never even thought about at their age.
They are significantly more food-aware than I was just ten years ago. This generational shift is everywhere. Between the constant flow of nutrition data on social media and GLP-1 medications dominating the headlines, there is a massive cultural focus on metabolic health.
Millions of people are trying to build sustainable habits. They want to stay healthy without completely depriving themselves of simple pleasures like a chocolate bar.
To balance a healthy lifestyle with the occasional treat, you need accurate, accessible data. But when you turn over a wrapper on a candy bar, to make an informed choice, you do not find clarity. You find a data dump.
Multinational food companies do not design these labels to help customers understand the food they eat. They design them to escape regulatory scrutiny. They consistently choose compliance over clarity. The current system of nutritional labelling is just a data dump designed to protect the companies from fines while actively confusing the consumer.
Let us look at a standard Cadbury Wispa bar to see exactly how this plays out in real life.
Three Points of Friction
1. The Phantom 100g The front side of the wrapper looks delicious and attractive. When you flip the wrapper over, you are greeted by a spreadsheet of numbers in small text. Regulators mandate that food companies provide nutritional values "Per 100g" so consumers can compare different products on a level playing field.
The problem is that this specific chocolate bar weighs 36 grams. Nobody is eating 100 grams of a 36-gram bar. The manufacturer complies with the law by including the 100g column, but doing so adds unnecessary noise. It forces the buyer to do fractions in their head just to understand what they are about to eat.
2. The Decoy Percentage While compliance dictates the back of the wrapper, marketing controls the front. The "BeTreatwise" graphic proudly highlights the numbers "818 kJ / 196 kcal / 10%" in a visual bubble that is difficult to understand. That 10% refers to the portion of an average adult's daily calorie needs. Ten percent feels low. It feels safe to eat.
You have to turn the bar around and read the smaller, cluttered circles to find the metric that actually matters. This single 36g bar contains 20 grams of sugar. That represents 22% of the recommended daily sugar allowance. The front sells you on the harmless 10%, while the back quietly buries the 22% in a sea of data.
3. Abstract Metrics Even when the user finds the right number, the unit of measurement is completely detached from human reality. The label tells you the bar has 20g of sugar. Grams are a measure of weight. Most people cannot accurately visualize 20 grams of powder. Compliance requires grams, but human comprehension requires visual reality. Because the metric is abstract, the impact of the information is lost. Yes, you have read the information, but you are not informed. Unless you are a math genius, you have no idea if you should eat 1 bar or 2 bars.
The Anatomy of a Useful Label
Good UX writing is supposed to remove the cognitive load from the user. If we want people to make informed dietary choices, we have to stop treating them like lab technicians. A helpful nutritional label should prioritize clear communication by following two basic rules:
Rule 1: Contextual Serving Sizes. If a product is packaged as a single portion, it should only display the data for that single portion.
Rule 2: Visual Translation. Abstract measurements like grams should be translated into everyday visual equivalents that the average person understands immediately.
On this Wispa bar, the information is there to serve a regulatory requirement. Mere compliance.
The Translation
If we strip away the regulatory bloat and the marketing fluff, we can present the exact same information in a way that is actually useful to the consumer.
The Reality (What mere compliance forces you to read):
Typical Values | Per 100g | Per 1 bar (36g) | *Reference Intakes |
Energy (kJ) | 2271 kJ | 818 kJ | 8400 kJ / 2000 kcal |
Energy (kcal) | 544 kcal | 196 kcal | 10% |
Fat | 32 g | 12 g | 17% |
of which Saturates | 19 g | 6.7 g | 34% |
Carbohydrate | 57 g | 21 g | |
of which Sugars | 56 g | 20 g | 22% |
Fibre | 2.3 g | 0.8 g | |
Protein | 6.6 g | 2.4 g | |
Salt | 0.24 g | 0.09 g | 2% |
This is cognitive overload. It forces you to scan past irrelevant baseline measurements (100g), ignore redundant energy metrics (kJ), and decode abstract weights (grams) just to find out if the snack fits your diet or not.
The Fix (What a human actually needs to know):
What is in this bar? (One 36g Serving)
Energy | 196 Calories (10% of your daily limit) |
Carbohydrates | 21g |
| This equals 5 teaspoons of sugar (22% of your daily limit). |
Fat | 12g (17% of your daily limit) |
Protein | 2.4g |
By simply dropping the 100g column (it is just noise on a 36g pack) and converting grams of sugar into teaspoons, the abstraction vanishes. The consumer can instantly understand and visualise what they are eating without having to run calculations in their heads to decode a spreadsheet. Would you add 5 teaspoons of sugar to your cup of tea?
The Tobacco Precedent: Why the Law Fails Us
It is easy to blame the companies, but the ultimate failure lies with regulators. We know governments are perfectly capable of enforcing highly effective visual communication. If you look at a cigarette pack, you see graphic images and massive, unavoidable text warning you of the danger. The government forces tobacco companies to use aggressive UX. People still smoke, but everyone who smokes knows the risks they are taking.
Why do we not see the same in the candy aisle? We do not need graphic images of sick people on a chocolate bar, but why can we not have a simple label that says: ‘Sugar: 20g. This equals 5 teaspoons of sugar (22% of your daily limit).’
The short answer is lobbying. The food industry spends billions to convince politicians that a chocolate bar is not a cigarette. They argue that sugar is not inherently toxic, so forcing them to print aggressive translations like "this equals 5 teaspoons of sugar" is unfair bias. But their chosen alternative is a data dump that is simply unreadable.
Politicians cave to this lobbying pressure by compromising. They mandate "neutral" data like grams and percentages. Regulators get to claim they are enforcing transparency, while the food industry prints confusing spreadsheets that most people cannot decode. We do not need idealistic politicians. We just need regulators to apply the exact same standard of clarity to what we eat as they do to what we smoke.
The Bottom Line
People are trying harder than ever to make smart, balanced choices about what they eat. But as long as multinational food companies treat nutritional labels as a legal obligation rather than a user interface, consumers will continue to struggle. Transparency should not amount to dumping compliant data onto a wrapper. It should be about giving people the right information in a language they can actually read and clearly understand.
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