Snapshots from the Edge: Washingtonpost.com’s Interactive Grocery Store Helps Readers Make Healthy Choices

“Childhood obesity is a problem on the scale of smoking in the United States. Much has been reported on it. What people need aren’t lectures or a repeat of information already out there. What they need are solutions.”

With that mantra, The Washington Post and washingtonpost.com set about covering the topic of childhood obesity in new ways that would help readers not only understand the gravity of the issue, but help them tackle the problem head-on. The full package is available at www.washingtonpost.com/obesity.

A key part of the effort was washingtonpost.com’s Virtual Grocery Store. The idea and execution: Let people choose among similar products at a virtual store to see how careful shopping can make a significant dent in the volume of unhealthy ingredients brought home.

First, our team (editors, a designer, a photographer and a database editor) discussed our goals and various ways we could approach the project. We then obtained two U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) nutritional databases with roughly 100,000 products and culled through the data and format. We also took children of various ages shopping to gain insight into the grocery products they like.

We discussed in depth how users would navigate the store and what amount of information we could manage to relay reasonably. This back and forth really helped us pare our ideas into a user-friendly store. A basic wireframe of the application flowed from the conversation.

From there, we bought and photographed enough food for 16 grocery store “aisles,” or categories – more than 80 products. Concurrently, the designer fleshed out the wire frames into the full-fledged application.

Each category holds some unhealthy options and some better choices; all of the products are aimed at kids. Click on foods and you’ll see their nutritional information, equalized to 100 gram portions wherever possible. These foods were all manually entered and verified into the USDA databases. Add them to your cart, and you’ll see a nutritional counter that totals all the calories, fat, sugar, sodium, cholesterol and other ingredients that an individual or family would consume.

At each aisle, a brief video from Lean Plate columnist Sally Squires explains how to read labels and think about that category of food. For each aisle, you can compare all the product labels at once to gauge how they stack up against each other. And if that wasn’t enough, we enabled people to search the entire USDA databases.

The store blended the best in online use of databases, video, graphics and interactivity to create a powerful, useful and unique tool for anyone.

Stacey Palosky is Lifestyles Editor for washingtonpost.com. She can be reached at Stacey.Palosky@washingtonpost.com.