Study: Customers want simpler, easier-to-understand food labeling

Progressive Grocer reports on a new survey from Guiding Stars Licensing Co., which suggests that grocery shoppers are getting fed up with arcane, hard-to-read and misleading nutritional information on the foods they buy.

According to the report, about a quarter of shoppers surveyed want a "good-better-best" labeling system to make it easier for them to compare products within a category. Roughly the same number said current labels are "exhausting to read" and "difficult to understand."

The story references an earlier Nielsen survey which corroborates the findings, but with a caveat — consumers shopping at stores that focus on healthier and more upscale food, such as Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, are more likely to read the labels in the first place than shoppers at mainstream and bargain grocers.