Australia

Food product and safety regulation

Health rating schemes

There is a voluntary front-of-pack labelling system in Australia known as the Health Star
Rating (HSR) that rates the overall nutritional profile of packaged foods and assigns a
rating between 0.5 (least healthy) and 5 stars (most healthy). The rating is determined
in accordance with the HSR Calculator and FSANZ's Nutrition Profiling Scoring Criterion.
The HSR considers the energy, saturated fat, sodium and total sugars content of a food
along with other factors such as fruit and vegetable content, and in some instances,
dietary fibre and protein content. Whether the HSR scheme will become mandatory for
food manufacturers and retailers in the future is subject to debate. The Health Star
Rating Style Guide is available here.

The inclusion of foreign health ratings or logos on front-of-pack is not prohibited per se
and will ultimately depend on the overall impression conveyed to the reasonable
consumer and the criteria against which the foreign rating is determined.