Green Light Foods: helping Pittsburgh families make healthier choices

We pop into grocery stores nearly every day, picking up snacks, drinks and meals for our families. Factors like cost, brand, packaging and taste definitely influence our purchasing. But what about health? Do we consider the healthiness of the food items that we purchase? Do we even know how to choose healthy foods?

Green Light Foods is a free mobile app developed by Let’s Move Pittsburgh to help families make informed decisions about the health of the foods and beverages they purchase at the grocery store.

“It can be time-consuming and confusing to read nutrition fact labels, so we wanted to develop a tool that could simplify this process,” says Mary Kathryn Poole, director of Let’s Move Pittsburgh. “We also envisioned this tool being a way to get kids involved in grocery shopping.”

As promised, Green Light Foods is easy to use. It can be downloaded for free at Google Play or the App Store. Users can then use the app to scan barcodes of any packaged foods or beverages. When a barcode is scanned, the Green Light Foods app searches its database to find the nutritional information associated with the item. It then compares these results with cutoff values determined by the UK Food Standards Agency (see below):

Green Light Foods takes these numbers and transforms them into something digestible–a green, yellow and red traffic light system that is easy to interpret for even the youngest children. The results can guide your grocery shopping, and maybe even reveal some surprises, too.

“Packaged oatmeal is typically deemed a healthy breakfast,” says Poole. “However, we scanned a brown sugar oatmeal package and found that it was yellow for fat, green for saturated fat, red for sugar and yellow for sodium. Our goal with Green Light Foods is that a user would see these values and keep scanning to find a healthier option.”

Let’s Move Pittsburgh developed this app in collaboration with students at Carnegie Mellon University. While it originally debuted early this year, an updated 2.0 version has just been released. Additional features in the new iteration include a pantry function–where products can be stored for comparison–and a system for entering foods and beverages that can’t be found in the database.

“By keeping the app simple, we can easily guide families as they make their food choices. We hope that Green Light Foods will prompt users to choose a product with less sugar, salt and fat. Over time, these small decisions can make a difference in the overall health of its users.”

Featured photo: Grocery shopping, Photo by Niki Love

This article was written by Nadine Champsi with contributions by Deanna Lee.