2009 – How Much Sugar do you Consume?

Nutrition labels are often difficult to apprehend: when you drink a can of coke, you consume 39g of sugar, but how much is that? In order to increase consumer's awareness of how much sugar they ingest when eating and drinking, several campains have used a physical visualization using actual sugar cubes and sugar grains to represent the sugar content in food.

Many examples can be found online (search for "sugar stacks" and "rethink your drink"). It is unclear when these representations started.

Both representations are examples of concrete scales, that use concrete objects to represent a complex measure (see [3] for more information). Also see this video.

Sources:

1. Left image from Sugar stacks (2009).
2. Right image from Nutrition Post (2012).
3. Fanny Chevalier, Romain Vuillemot, Guia Gali (2013) Concrete Scales: A Practical Framework for the Visual Depiction of Complex Measures.