Burkey Belser, the graphic designer who created the ubiquitous nutrition facts label – a stark rectangle listing calories, fat, sodium and other content information — that adorns the packaging of nearly every digestible product in supermarkets, died last week at 76, from bladder cancer.
Belser’s nutrition facts label was celebrated as a triumph of public health and graphic design when it debuted in 1994 after the passing of the US Nutrition Labelling and Education Act.
Although some products had previously included nutritional information, there was no set standard, and the information was of little public health value in helping consumers make better food choices, reports The Washington Post.
The new law, drafted as obesity and other diet-related illnesses were surging, required mandatory food labels with nutrients presented in the context of a healthy 2 000-calorie-a-day diet.
The US Food and Drug Administration chose Belser to design the nutrition label after his successful creation of the black and yellow energy guide label for appliances. Once dubbed the “Steve Jobs of information design”, his fondness for simple design perfectly suited him for a job that required stripping down nutritional facts to the bare essentials.
Working pro bono – US Congress did not appropriate design funds – Belser and his team laboured through three dozen iterations of the label.
There were many cooks in the kitchen. The Agriculture Department, for instance, was concerned the label would cause consumers to eat less meat, which is typically higher in fat and calories than other foods.
“You not only have FDA as a player in the design, you have industry people who want to guide what the label says and does,” he said in 2014. “You have consumer groups, and they have an agenda. All three are doing battle day after day after day. ‘Do this, don’t do that.’”
The squabbling resulted in a multitude of design ideas, including pie charts, sliding graph charts, colours and even the image of the sun. All of them posed dilemmas. Which were easier to understand, pie charts or sliding graphs? If red were used, would that signal to shoppers not to eat the food?
Even the sun was problematic.
“We thought that would be a great image of health, but in fact, people couldn’t tell whether the sun was rising or setting,” Belser said.
Belser, working with FDA officials, ultimately settled on, as he later put it, “simplicity in itself”.
“There’s a harmony about it, and the presentation has no extraneous components to it,” he told The Washington Post. “The words are left and right justified, which gave it … balance. There was no grammatical punctuation like commas or periods or parentheses to slow down the reader.”
Belser compared the finished product – which he later adapted to over-the-counter drugs – to the Apple iPod.
“The detail is so important that you wouldn’t even notice it, and if you didn’t notice it, it’s a sign that it succeeded,” he said. “I don’t know if anybody’s heart beats faster when they see nutrition facts, but they sense a pleasure that they get the information they need.”
In an interview, David Kessler, the FDA chief during the label’s creation, called Belser “an absolute genius”, while President Bill Clinton honoured him with a Presidential Design Award.
“The label had enormous public health impact for millions and millions of people who rely on it every day,” Kessler said.
James Burkey Belser was born in Columbia, California, in 1947. His father was a lawyer, and his mother an interior designer.
As a boy, he loved The New Yorker magazine cartoons, and often redrew them. He majored in English and minored in studio art at Davidson College in North Carolina, graduating in 1969.
He then studied French literature at the University of Montpellier in southern France, and when he returned, in 1970, found a job as circulation director of Avant Garde, an arts and politics magazine published by controversial editor and author Ralph Ginzburg.
He left after a year, travelling Turkey and then Kathmandu, with his girlfriend, Donna Greenfield, and after returning to the US, landed a job as business manager of the Righteous Apple, a graphic design studio in Washington.
Some 18 months later, he set out on his own, teaching himself graphic design and creating samples of magazine brochures, posters and logos to show prospective clients. He made hundreds of calls, resulting in handfuls of meetings.
He persisted and ultimately launched Burkey Belser in 1978, the same year he married his wife, who was a government lawyer. She started a consulting company focusing on professional services, and the two entities eventually merged into Greenfield/Belser.
Their design firm was an early and dominant player in legal advertising and branding, a new category of business that opened up after the Supreme Court’s 1977 ruling in Bates v State Bar of Arizona that advertising for legal services was protected commercial speech.
The firm grew to more than 40 employees and was also a leader in arts branding, book catalogue covers and corporate design. Finn Partners, a global design agency, bought Greenfield/Belser in 2016.
In 2016, the FDA modified the nutrition label, with the most noticeable change being a large increase in type-size for calories.
“The simplicity has been abandoned in favour of brute-force communication,” Belser said at the time.
But in another sense, the changes were a victory.
“This is the first time they have touched the label in 20 years,” he said. “I think that says what we did then was done right.”
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Activists campaign for easy-to-understand, user-friendly food labelling
New, stricter rules for food labelling
SA set to carry warning labels on ‘junk food’