A few months ago, the US Food and Drug Administration redesigned the nutrition facts label. The FDA made subtle improvements to the label's legibility, and even published an explainer, to teach people how to read it. These upgrades were well received; but if you ask Sam Slover, there's still plenty of room for improvement.

Slover is co-founder of the Sage Project, a new online platform that reimagines food data for the Internet age. Slover's vision isn't a label; it's an interactive web app. Sage deconstructs more than 20,000 fresh and packaged foods (mostly organic brands from Whole Foods, for now) into interactive, personalized blurbs of information that make the basics of food labels—calories, top nutrients, ingredients, and allergens—easier to digest.

Slover wanted to provide people with more than raw data about the foods they eat. He wanted to communicate what a food's nutritional content actually means in the context of a person's health, activity levels, and fitness goals. "We want to unlock data and give it back to people in ways that are actionable," he says.

Take the ingredients list, for example. The FDA's label itemizes ingredients in descending order of weight. It seems straightforward enough, but when Slover asked dieticians which aspects of the FDA's food label they found troublesome, they repeatedly pointed to this list. Knowing what items are in your food is different from knowing what those items are and where they originate. That's important information, but there's no room for it on the FDA's label.