Facts Up Front Initiative and a Grocery Store Scavenger Hunt

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of the Facts Up Front program.

Learn about the Facts Up Front initiative – where key nutrition facts appear on the front of the food label. Go on a grocery store scavenger hunt to explore food choices.

Facts Up Front Initiative

I am a label reader. I want to know what is in the products I buy. I look at the ingredient list and the nutrition facts to help me make decisions on whether or not to bring a product home. The Facts Up Front initiative helps make looking for certain nutrition facts easier.

Key information from the Nutrition Facts Panel is brought to the front of the package. You can quickly see information about the serving size, calories, and 3 nutrients to limit in your diet {saturated fat, sodium, and sugar}. Many times there will also be information about 1 or 2 nutrients that are a part of a healthy diet. If the product contains 10 percent or more of the daily value per serving of the nutrient and the FDA considers the product a “good source” of that nutrient, you may see the nutrient listed on the Facts Up Front label.

Grocery Store Scavenger Hunt

Aiden {age 4} and I went to the grocery store to check out the Facts Up Front label and use it to help us learn more about food choices. We walked through the store and took pictures of products containing the Facts Up Front label. While the Facts Up Front label is prevalent in grocery stores, not every company is using the labels yet. You can check out a list of partner companies on the Facts Up Front website. Hy-Vee is a store in our area that has the Facts Up Front labels on their store brand products, so I chose to conduct our scavenger hunt at Hy-Vee to make it easier for us to find the labels.

I created a set of questions about the products we found. You can take the questions on your scavenger hunt in the grocery store and look for the products or you can print the questions with the product pictures already showing. I’ve done similar activities looking at nutrition facts labels in my high school Biology classes. I would bring in lots of product boxes for them to explore. You can do this activity with food already in your home as well. How you set it up is entirely up to you. The questions I created work for a range of ages. Some math and reading skills are required to answer the questions. My goal for doing this activity with my 4 year old was to make him aware of the food labels. If he starts noticing them now, he will continue to pay attention to them later in life. As we walked through the store, he would point out products that had the Facts Up Front labels. I read the information on the labels to him and talked to him about calories, salt, and sugar.

Here is a sample question from the scavenger hunt: Find a canned green vegetable. How many calories does it have per serving?

Download the Grocery Store Scavenger Hunt printable with product pictures {9 questions, 4 pages}. This works well as a stand alone worksheet if you don’t want to go to the store or use products in your home.

Download the Grocery Store Scavenger Hunt printable without product pictures {just 9 questions, 1 page}. This works well for going to the store or having the actual products on hand.

More Resources from the Facts Up Front Initiative

• Nutrition Quiz – Take the Interactive Quiz and test your knowledge of calories, nutrients, and portion sizes. Explore the Facts Up Front website and then take the quiz.
• Find Facts Up Front on Twitter: @FactsUpFront
• Like Facts Up Front on Facebook

How do you encourage learning about nutrition and making food choices?

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This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of the Facts Up Front program.