Long read
Reading food and drink labels with sight loss
Imagine walking into a supermarket with just 10% of your vision. This is the reality of Taylor Notcutt, who was diagnosed at the age of two with leber congenital amaurosis – a condition that means she has very limited sight.
“I have a rods and cones dystrophy – basically most of the receptors between my eyes and brain are missing. One of the receptors I have missing is depth perception, everything looks totally flat or too deep, so I have no idea how far away objects are or how deep a step is, for example,” she explained.
Notcutt had been on the list for guide dogs for several years, and in May 2023 she was matched with Jilly – a lab retriever cross. Jilly has given Notcutt a new-found independence and inspired her advocacy work.
Over the last year, Notcutt has launched her podcast How to be a VIP (visually impaired person) and worked with several charities and other brands, including Hush and L'occitane, to raise awareness and improve accessibility for those with sight loss – in the UK alone, that’s 2m people.
Reading F&B labels with sight loss
For a lot of ‘VIPs’, food shopping will not be a case of casually nipping to the shops, but an activity that requires planning and assistance.
Research from Müller which polled 200 people in Britain living with sight loss, found that as many as 68% avoid the supermarket because of stress.
“We also found 77% have mistakenly picked up the wrong item whilst food shopping, with almost a quarter (23%) admitting they waste an hour every shop trying to find what they need,” added Maiya Patel, brand manager for Müller Yogurt & Desserts.
With Patel at the helm, the dairy brand has since equipped its Müller Light and Müller Rice SKUs with NaviLens – a technology that enables an audible playback of the label information when scanned with a smartphone.
“These staggering statistics really made us think about how we could improve the shopping experience for blind and partially sighted people.”
Speaking with Notcutt on her in-supermarket experience, she said she relies a lot on her keen sense of smell: “I use my nose a lot in the store. I’m like ‘ah, this smells like vegetables or bakery’ [and] when I’m near the section I want, I usually then ask for help.
“But NaviLens has been a game changer. It means I am a bit freer with what I purchase.”
While audible playback is not a new technology, what makes NaviLens particularly unique is that it can be scanned out of focus and up to 12 times farther away than a QR code, due to its wider reading angle of 160 degrees. This means that the user doesn’t need to know exactly where the code is located in order to scan it, so a wave of a phone in the general direction of a store shelf is usually sufficient.
The app then sends audio and haptic cues allowing users to locate and centre the code in the smartphone’s camera.
It also, as Notcutt explained, reads the important details first: “I use two apps. For packaging without NaviLens, I use Seeing AI – it’s great but it reads absolutely everything. It could start by reading me the grammage of the item but I won’t know what it actually is! Whereas, NaviLens will tell me ‘this is a pack of Pringles, do you want to know more?’ and I can click to get additional details.”
While unexpectantly drinking lemonade when you thought you’d open a diet cola may come as a surprise to anyone’s taste buds, knowing what’s in your food and drink can be a life-or-death situation for some.
Navigating labels with a visual impairment and specific dietary requirements is, therefore, a minefield.
“Poor labelling has led to 61% feeling concerned they’ll purchase an item containing an allergen they can’t eat,” said Patel.
“The lack of accessibility also forces the community to rely on others to complete their shop, with nine in 10 turning to family, friends, or supermarket employees for assistance.
“Depending on shopper preferences, the [NaviLens] app can either read aloud the ingredients, allergens, nutrition and recycling information for the product, or the user can read the information on their phone using accessibility tools.”
Kellanova Europe also uses NaviLens and was the first to apply the technology to a piece of consumer foods packaging back in 2020, when it trialled a limited-edition pack of Coco Pops to raise awareness on World Sight Day.
Since then, it has added NaviLens codes on all of its product’s packaging across Europe and is beginning to include it as a feature to its point of sale materials as well.
“That’s over 1,000 SKUs across our cereal and snacks brands and equates to over 1.5bn pieces of printed packaging, each of which are now accessible to blind and partially sighted people,” Steve Wardle, senior manager, design operations & process for Kellanova-owned brands Kellogg’s and Pringles, told Food Manufacture.
“All the feedback we’ve had has been 100% positive, which has exceeded even our own expectations. We’ve started a purpose driven movement with people at the heart of it and you can see how it’s made a real difference by enabling people to shop independently.
“One item of feedback we get consistently is ‘why can’t we have NaviLens on all packaging?’ – and we agree, that’s why we continue to talk externally about the benefits of adding NaviLens with other brands.
“If all packaging had NaviLens codes on, it would be a fully inclusive experience. That’s what we are advocating for and actively talking with governments in the UK and EU for policy change to support this.”
More recently, we have seen Nestlé's Purina's Bakers announce it will be joining the NaviLens family, making it the first global pet food brand to announce such strides.
From early 2025, Bakers' main meal products will be equipped with the special code, supporting blind or partially sighted dog owners.
Alongside providing haptic cues to help visually impaired pet owners navigate to Bakers' products on shelf, the NaviLens app can also guide users to the correct Bakers' food based on preferences they’ve already set up in the app, such as life stage, lifestyle or preferred Bakers sub-ranges. Shoppers will also be able to access feeding guidelines for their pet via the app.
“The addition of NaviLens to our packs is an industry first and we are very proud to be able to offer this technology to make Bakers as accessible as possible," commented Natalie Golland, senior brand manager for Bakers.
While this is a new journey for Bakers, for Kellanova the NaviLens story started several years back. In 2019, the company spoke with a range of children attending St Vincent’s – a specialist school for the blind and partially sighted near Liverpool.
“These children told us in no uncertain terms how difficult it is for them to access information on all packaging and challenged us to make our packs more accessible,” Wardle explained.
Braille, textures and contrast
“That’s when we contacted the RNIB in the UK to discuss how we could do this. We included braille on our Coco Pops trial pack – which we thought was particularly important, but we learned from the RNIB that less than 10% of blind people actually use braille – people are switching to technology led solutions instead these days as it’s far more accessible.
“When we looked at what solutions we’re available, it was very limited, but we heard about NaviLens, which was originally created to help with guidance around public transport systems. We asked NaviLens if we could trial adding a small NaviLens code to our pack and share the product information data through the app and this ended up being the most important innovation on the pack.”
“Some people say it’s a dying thing,” added Notcutt on Braille. “I still find it helpful, but not many people can read it.”
For Notcutt, alongside NaviLens, a useful and perhaps more inclusive alternative, would be to include tactile elements to the packaging.
“Instead of adding Braille, you could just raise the normal print on the packaging.
“This could be quite useful for everyone, including sighted people. If you’re reaching in the back of the cupboard, you could feel the raised lettering and know without looking that it’s a tin of beans.”
When it comes to visual impairments and packaging, Notcutt noted that brands need to be mindful of those who don’t use technology or for occasions when one’s phone might be out of battery.
Post-purchase accessibility
She also pointed out that due consideration must be paid to a product’s use after purchase.
“I have to attach slow pourers to a lot of bottle tops to avoid spilling liquids,” she explained. “I like milk bottles with handles because they’re easier and squeezy bottles because it means I don’t have to worry too much about measurements.”
She continued: “I like packaging when it’s easy to open.” She referenced yogurt containers, where the lids sometimes peel off too quickly, causing the contents to spill.
“The number of times I've accidentally flung yoghurt around! There’s probably a yoghurt tsunami somewhere in this flat,” she added jovially.
She also pointed out that while some brands can be distinctive from others due to their shape (calling out Toblerone and Ferrero Rocher as SKUs that do this well), the options within a brand’s repertoire (such as different flavours in a range) can sometimes be difficult to differentiate.
“My vision is very light-dependent, so colour contrast is really important.”
Offering an example for food producers, she suggested packaging could be made more distinguishable by bright colours, for those, like her, who have some vision.
“Let’s take yoghurt, you could add a bold pink for strawberry, a bright blue for blueberry, or take that a step further and make the packs textured, so the blueberry pack is bobbled.”
Incremental changes, monumental impact
But as Notcutt said, it’s not just about the physical experience of shopping, it’s also the digital one that needs attention.
“Online shopping is, I think, the hardest thing – basically no brand, that I have come across, offer visual descriptions.”
As Notcutt alluded to, making changes to give way to more accessible shopping experiences don’t have to be drastic or all at once. Simple baby steps, such as adding alt descriptions to your website, can go a long way.
And for brands concerned over sustainability and waste, packaging alternatives can be made in phases – an approach which Müller is taking, with its Corner and Müller Bliss next in line (expected this month) to join the NaviLens family.
“Incremental changes can make monumental impact. Something as small as a paragraph under a picture or a discreet label that do not affect a sighted person, will hold significant positive impact for a visually impaired individual,” Notcutt shared.
“Being able to take ownership of our purchases is such a freeing experience and will give us another dimension of the sighted world. Just being able to say, ‘I did my food shop without assistance’ will be such an empowering experience.”
