[incongruity]

Can all things be solely and uniquely communicated by an icon? I'd expect not - it's not so different from the collisions you get with TLAs (Three letter acronyms)

On the other hand, is an icon set successful if you can see the label once and then keep it straight without labels in the future? I'd say so and I think this work gets close to doing that.

[prewett]

If McDonald's hadn't copyright/trademarked the icons, maybe. But if McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, Applebee's, the US government nutritional publications, etc. all have a different icon set, good luck.

[azinman2]

But if we do that then things could look more like the FDA label and just literally repeat the words "fat", "protein," etc but translated into the local language.

[throwaway91111]

err, why would that be desirable? That seems like the worst case scenario, not the best.

[azinman2]

Because there's no ambiguity. I have no idea what those icons mean except 'cal' or 'kcal', so if I have to look up a legend then to decode it then I might as well have the word in place. A giant table of icons & numbers isn't necessary a better case than a giant table of words that I can read & numbers.

[derefr]

I believe half the point was to design for the use-case where you can't fit a "giant table of words [you] can read & numbers." Where currently the nutritional information ends up in restaurants on e.g. a sheet on the wall instead of on your food, or in grocery stores on product bulk packaging (e.g. cardboard boxes that get thrown away, etc.) instead of on the individual product units.

Consider that numbers take up relatively-constant amounts of space, but words for some nutritional concepts in some languages can be extremely long—and mostly you design for this by just requiring the design-element to have a box-size of the widest possible text in the widest language, and then padding the box with empty space almost all of the time.

Removing the words, and just having icons + numbers, allows for a design that can be very "narrow" in horizontal area, taking up a basically-constant amount of space with very little padding, allowing it to fit in many places it currently wouldn't.

[azinman2]

I would suggest that if it can't currently fit then it needs to be rethought if it should be there at all, especially if abbreviations can't be used in whatever language it's required.

Icons that are impossible to decipher don't improve anything IMHO. Perhaps they should have gone culturally-specific, something with just the first letter, or anything else that people might locally understand if the word absolutely can't be used.

[derefr]

Why is it a problem if people can't understand the icons right now? The goal is to slap them on everything, everywhere, for decades. Complete, textual nutrition labels will continue existing where they already do. People will make the mental association when they're looking at their food packaging and see the two kinds of labels, with the same numbers between the two.

Is it a problem that the "floppy disk" symbol for saving documents is now meaningless, since floppy disks are dead? Kids who encounter the icon today, just learn the meaning by rote. To them, it's an opaque language element representing a concept—just like, say, Chinese characters. Humans turn out to be okay at just absorbing the associations of an opaque icon over time, without the icon needing to be specifically evocative (skeuomorphic) of anything. It just needs to be unique.

And re: "it needs to be rethought if it should be there at all"—consider, for example, individual-serving yoghurt snack tubes. What's in them? Who knows? The info is on the box, not on the tube. Can you "count calories" on a lunch containing one? Nope, not unless you wrote down the calories from the box when you were at home. Kind of annoying, no?