Eating too much sugar results in extra calories, which causes fat to build up, and could lead to heart disease, cancer or type 2 diabetes. The most recent estimates are that excess body weight costs the UK NHS alone £5.4 billion a year.

To many in the UK this isn’t new news.

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 newly acquired awareness has done little to reduce sugar consumption.

The average Briton consumes an alarming 175 sugar cubes each week.

Whilst many would like to cut down, they struggle because sugar is hidden throughout their entire diet.

Many people aren’t aware of how much sugar they consume.

But this naivety isn’t due to a lack of information. Most pre-packaged foods contains the sugar content.

Sounds helpful, but in the real world of habitual shopping trips and rushed online shopping orders these labels can be easily ignored or completely missed.

Even if the labels are noticed they do little to help understand the accumulation of sugar content in a shopping basket.

Bar getting a calculator out and doing a few sums, it’s virtually impossible to know how much sugar could build up when grocery shopping.

Imagine how the nations diet could improve if understanding the sugar content of a shop wasn’t so hard?

The answer - the world’s first Sugar Accumulator – currently live on mysupermarket.co.uk, a data visualisation of the sugar content in your online shopping basket, which dynamically updates in real time as you shop.

Whilst helpfully suggesting swaps to lower sugar alternatives, for products in the same food category which you can swap as you shop.

Never been done before, the Sugar Accumulator can influence the food and drink choices people make at point of purchase by highlighting the sugar content of their basket in real time.

Helping shoppers understand, for the first time, the amount of sugar they’re purchasing.

Simply put, 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.

To do this, we partnered with mySupermarket.co.uk, the UK's largest supermarket aggregator.

For simplicity we used familiar front of pack traffic light colours to display high (red), medium (amber) and low (green) volumes of sugar.

A two-step approach was built into the back end functionality of the Sugar Accumulator.

Firstly to identify each product’s sugar content, based on Government nutritional guideline data and secondly to quantify the number of sugar products in a shopper’s online basket.

For example, if a product was identified as a high sugar product, the ratio of the colour red on the Sugar Accumulator bar increases.

The ratio of colours on the Accumulator directly represented the number of low, medium and high sugar products in a shopper’s trolley.

The visual and reactive nature means shoppers are consciously aware of the sugar content in their shop and are naturally encouraged to consider swaps to lower sugar alternatives.

We knew that total spend was the highest viewed area of any online shopping site so strategically placed the Sugar Accumulator directly below the shopper’s checkout.

It could then act as a constant reminder of the sugar being purchased.

In addition to visualising sugar accumulation in shopper's baskets, a summary page also identifies which products are high in sugar and suggests lower sugar alternatives in the same food category.

Making it easy to choose healthier choices as people shop.

In the first month after going live, mySupermarket measured an incredible 1.2 million shoppers who clicked on the Sugar Accumulator tool.

Due to the initial success, mySupermarket are keeping the Sugar Accumulator running as an on-going site feature.

There is also the potential for Public Health England to expand the functionality of the Accumulator tool to be used across all other nutritional categories such as fat, saturated fat, calories, and salt.

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

Making sugar visible at the key decision moment during the purchase journey has resulted in a solution that drives tangible and measurable behaviour change.

Imperative for the UK’s overall health, this behaviour change could, in the long term, ultimately improve attitudes towards healthier foods and drinks, hopefully leading to reductions in the obesity epidemic in England.

The potential for the ground-breaking Sugar Accumulator, as an industry solution, is massive.

Finally, the technology innovation behind the accumulator has the opportunity to be used on all major online supermarket sites in the future as well as be implemented around the world.