Research Roundup

Voluntary versus mandatory food labels, Australia

17 October 2024

The current debate over mandating the HSR provides a backdrop to this review (1) which discusses the comparison between voluntary and mandatory food labels in Australia, specifically focusing on the uptake of the Health Star Rating (HSR) system and country-of-origin labelling (CoOL).  

The authors state that the implementation of the HSR and CoOL policies over similar time periods provide “a natural experiment for assessing labelling compliance resulting from differing regulatory approaches.” 

FoodSwitch data were collected annually from 2015 to 2023 through surveys of four large Australian food retailers, focusing on the number and proportion of products carrying HSR and CoOL. It was noted that CoOL is mandatory for priority products, whereas it is voluntary for non-priority products.  

Results indicated that the uptake of the voluntary HSR increased steadily from 2014 to 2018, peaking at 42% in 2021 before dropping to 39% in 2023. In comparison, the mandatory CoOL saw rapid uptake, reaching 93% of products in 2023. In categories where CoOL was voluntary, uptake was found to be 48% by 2023.  

The authors concluded that the rapid and widespread adoption of CoOL demonstrated that mandatory labelling could achieve significant changes quickly. This contrasted with the limited uptake of voluntary labelling for both the HSR and CoOL for non-priority products. With some manufacturers not implementing HSR labelling even when product packaging was updated to display new CoOL, the authors suggested that the cost of redesigning and updating packaging is not the main factor influencing company behaviour.  

The authors advocate that the Australian government should mandate the HSR system to maximise its benefits as the results demonstrated that mandatory front-of-pack nutrition labelling is effective and be considered best practice globally. The study supported other jurisdictions in implementing mandatory nutrition labelling and updating global guidelines to reflect this approach.  

The authors acknowledged that no single policy would be sufficient to address the burden of unhealthy diets therefore policymakers should frame front-of-pack nutrition labelling as part of a suite of comprehensive policies, and that front-of pack nutrition labelling be aligned with dietary guidelines and other nutrition policies and provide complementary consumer education. To extend the usefulness of front-of-pack nutrition labelling, the authors proposed authorities should consider integrating front-of-pack nutrition labelling with measures on, for example, restrictions on marketing of unhealthy foods, school food and other public procurement policies to stimulate greater effects across the food system. 

The authors cited a key strength of the review being the use of a high-quality longitudinal data set covering a large sample of products, although it did not include every food product in Australia eligible for each labelling system. A major limitation was the policy context which limits the transferability of the methods to other settings. Additionally, some errors may have occurred in the assignment of individual products as eligible for labelling under each system.  

Reference  

1. Jones A, Maganja D, Shahid M, Neal B, Pettigrew S. Voluntary versus mandatory food labels, Australia. Bull World Health Organ. 2024 Oct 1;102(10):691-698. doi: 10.2471/BLT.24.291629. Epub 2024 Aug 27. PMID: 39318891; PMCID: PMC11418841. https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/bulletin/online-first/blt.24.291629.pdf?sfvrsn=db149843_3