The Sugar Accumulator is a dynamic digital bar that visually represents the ratio of low, medium and high sugar products in a shopper’s online basket. Front of pack traffic light colours red (high), amber (medium) and green (low) were used for simplicity.

The Accumulator was embedded on mysupermarket.co.uk, the largest supermarket aggregator in the UK.

Strategically placed under the checkout, it provides a constant reminder of the sugar being purchased as people shop. We even included a sugar breakdown of all products in shopper baskets, easily identifying high sugar culprits to encourage swaps to lower sugar alternatives within food categories.

Put simply, the Sugar Accumulator made sugar in our online shop visible for the first time.

In the first month alone, over 1.2m shoppers clicked on the Sugar Accumulator tool.

Thanks to its success, mySupermarket are keeping the tool as an ongoing site feature, with the potential for other major UK supermarkets to integrate it into their own sites too.

And it doesn’t stop there. Public Health England could use the accumulator across all other nutritional categories.

This could dramatically change the way online grocery shoppers consciously think about what they add to their baskets and, ultimately change consumption habits.

Frequent shock headlines (e.g. “sugar is the new tobacco”) across the media have put the concerns of a diet high in sugar front of mind.

But this understanding had done little to reduce sugar consumption. It was still the major contributor to the UK’s obesity crisis.

The average Briton consumes 175 cubes of sugar each week!

Many people aren’t aware of how much sugar they consume because sugar is hidden throughout their entire diet.

This naivety isn’t due to a lack of information. Most pre-packaged foods contain sugar content, but labels are easily missed and don’t show the accumulation of sugar content in an online shopping basket.

We needed to make the invisible visible.

Our solution, the world’s first Sugar Accumulator.

A real time data visualisation of the sugar content in your online shopping basket, which updates in real time as you shop and encourages swaps to lower sugar alternatives.