McDonald’s Case Study on “Creating a New Language of Nutrition” Covers Cultural Analysis for Nutrition Icons Used in Over 109 Locales

McDonald’s and ENLASO Corporation have authored this ground breaking case study on how icons, designed to represent nutritional information, were culturally evaluated for worldwide use. McDonald’s decided to take its Nutritional Initiative to all of its markets by visually representing nutritional information on food packaging globally. The main challenge was developing icons or images that would work with or without language, in over 109 locales. This case study covers how ENLASO’s linguistic iconographers determined which images would work in all regions without offending local cultural sensitivities. McDonald’s is making the final nutritional icons freely available to the food and restaurant industries worldwide, hoping to help set a standard for visually conveying nutritional information.

The case study reveals McDonald’s intense commitment to reaching all of their consumers worldwide. Over a dozen icons were evaluated against eight criteria in 109 locales, and over 13,000 comments had to be evaluated. The image-dependent, highly subjective feedback from iconographers required the data to be manually distilled. The case study covers these project management challenges and their solutions.

About the author:
A pioneer in the field of multilingual tools and technology, Maxwell Hoffmann is a 20-year veteran of high volume, scalable publishing, and localization solutions. Hoffmann frequently contributes articles and information to ENLASO's Multilingual Standard Newsletter service and currently manages ENLASO's Consulting and Training Solutions.