Into food fads? Checked the facts?
Overview
Popular foods that once took Korea by storm — giant castella cakes 🍞 , brown sugar bubble tea 🥛 , and croffles 🥐 ...
Have you tried them all, following trends with friends? Many foods that Koreans eagerly embraced in line with trends are typically spicy, salty, or sweet. But have you ever seriously wondered, do these Instagram-worthy, delicious foods actually benefit my body?
To uncover the nutritional makeup of these trendy foods, we created a data visualization to see if following the trends might be leading to unintentional overconsumption of sugar, sodium, and other nutrients.
- SNU Spring 2021
- Visualization
- Team Project
- Data Collection
- Main Infographic Design
- Food Illustration
Sujin Han
Nayoon Park
Ji-young Yoo
Jin Ki Choi
Jiwoo Hwang
2021. 04 - 2021. 06
Adobe Illustrator, R, Excel
Process
1 Data Collection
What were some past food fads?
Based on a news article
What characteristics of these foods should we examine?
- Taste
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Number of accumulated Instagram posts (popularity)
- Grams per serving
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Calories per serving
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Nutritional content
— Sugar, sodium, fat, and cholesterol
Why these four?
... because these are nutrients that can cause issues when consumed in excess!
(Source: Data from the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the U.S. Department of Agriculture)
Where should we collect the data from?
- Food and Drug Safety Ministry Nutritional Information Database
- Contacted brand headquarters via email
- Collected opinions from various people through a online survey
2 Data Refinement
On the nutrition labels commonly found on snack packages, both per serving size and total serving size are listed, with nutritional values provided for each. However, sometimes the serving size is smaller than expected, or the total serving size is based on two servings. For this reason, we aim to present the calories and nutrients based on a single serving size. For smaller snack packages, the total amount is considered as one serving.
Additionally, using the daily nutritional reference values provided by the Enforcement Rule of the Act on Labeling and Advertising of Foods, we calculated the percentage (%) of each nutrient in relation to the daily recommended intake.
3 Visualization Ideation
We symbolized information about food fads as flowers.
Noticeable characteristics—taste, number of Instagram posts, and grams per serving—are represented by petals and stems, while less noticeable attributes—calories per serving and nutritional content—are represented as roots beneath the ground.
Sketches
Outcomes
Main Infographic
Into Food Fads? Checked the facts?
How to read
01
Based on the results of a preliminary survey, we categorized the four flavors—spiciness, sweetness, saltiness, and umami—into three levels. A flavor is represented at the largest level, level 3, if it is strongest, and level 0 if it is undetectable. The size of the petals varies proportionally with the intensity level.
02
03
This allows for a quick comparison of the quantity and calorie content.
How many calories are in the portion sizes of the foods you frequently eat?
04
A large granule indicates 10% of the daily recommendation, and a small granule represents 1%.
When you consume these foods, how much of the daily recommended amount are you actually taking in? Are there any foods that exceed the daily recommendation?
Insights
01
02
03
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05
Additional Poster
One-Day Diet of Food Fads
For breakfast, a buttery croffle; for lunch, refreshing Pyongyang cold noodles; for dinner, spicy mala soup; with a sweet fat macaron as a snack and Buldak spicy noodles for a late-night craving. If you ate these trending foods for all three meals in a day, how much sugar, sodium, cholesterol, and fat would you consume?
The granules spilling from the cracks in the pot represent the excess percentages of nutrients beyond the daily recommended intake. Sodium exceeds the recommended amount by 191% and fat by 79%.
In other words, if you base your meals solely on trending foods, you may end up unintentionally consuming excessive amounts of certain nutrients.
Printed Goods
Food Fad Flowers Bookmarks
Retrospective
Throughout the Spring 2021 semester, we held countless Zoom meetings due to COVID-19.
Using Zoom’s user reports, we visualized our total meeting time on Zoom!
Looking back on our team project through this visualization...
01
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For example, while collecting data, we also considered possible visualization approaches for the dataset.
03
For data visualization, we spent a lot of time deciding on the concept and what elements to visualize, and defining the visualization grammar was challenging.
For data collection, it was remarkably difficult to gather nutritional information for certain foods, as many sources didn’t provide these details.
Final Send-Off
🍪
Thank you all so, so much for all your hard work. 💗
Wishing everyone a bright and refreshing summer ahead. 🌳
🥘
Thank you all so much for your hard work!
🥙
I'm so grateful to have been able to wrap up this project with such amazing teammates!
🍝
Thank you all!
🍣
I’m happy with the final result and think I’ll remember the process for a long time. ☺️
Great job, everyone. 💖
Takeaways
This project allowed me to channel my creativity and love for design, making it an enjoyable experience from start to finish. By collecting and analyzing data to create a poster on a single theme, I explored designing original visualization rules, which sparked my interest in pursuing more data visualization projects in the future.
Additionally, the process inspired me to consider evolving this concept into an interactive website, further expanding its potential to engage users and present data in a dynamic, immersive way.