If you have ever stood in a supermarket aisle, packet in hand, trying to work out whether one product is actually any healthier than its neighbour — this guide is for you. Food labels are the most useful piece of consumer-protection information you have, and they are also the most frequently misread. Our team spends a lot of time on this question. Here is the no-nonsense version.
By the end of this guide you should be able to walk through a supermarket and read any packet on the shelf with reasonable confidence in about thirty seconds.
The three things on the back of every packet that matter
Most of what is printed on the back of an Australian packaged food is informational noise. Three things matter and the rest is decoration.
1. The nutrition information panel — and how to read it
Every packaged food in Australia carries a nutrition information panel by law. It shows two columns: per serve and per 100g. The per-100g column is the only fair way to compare two products to each other, because the manufacturer chooses what “a serve” means and they are often optimistic.
What to look at first, every time, is the per-100g column. Get used to scanning it in a single sweep.
2. The ingredients list
Ingredients are listed in descending order by weight. If sugar, vegetable oil, salt or a flavour-disguise word like “natural flavour” is in the top three ingredients, you are eating a treat — even if the marketing on the front says otherwise. A short ingredients list with words you recognise is almost always a good sign.
3. The serving size
Compare the serving size on the packet to how much of the product you actually eat. Cereal packets typically declare a 30-gram serve. Most adults eat at least double that. If the per-serve numbers look fine but the per-100g numbers are alarming, the serving size is doing the manufacturer’s marketing for them.
The numbers worth memorising
You do not need to remember much. These four thresholds — applied to the per-100g column — give you a fast read on most products.
- Total sugars — under 5g per 100g is low, 5–15g is moderate, over 22.5g is high. For breakfast cereals, aim for under 15g.
- Saturated fat — under 1.5g per 100g is low, over 5g is high.
- Sodium — under 120mg per 100g is excellent, under 400mg is acceptable, over 600mg is a red flag.
- Fibre — over 6g per 100g is good. Bread, cereals and crackers should clear this comfortably.
That is genuinely the entire system. If you can read those four numbers per 100g, you can rank almost any packet against a comparable alternative on the same shelf.
The Health Star Rating: useful, with caveats
The Health Star Rating is the front-of-pack rating system Australia introduced in 2014. Products are scored from 0.5 to 5 stars based on nutrition information. It is a useful first filter — a 4.5-star yoghurt is usually better than a 2.5-star yoghurt — but with two important caveats:
- It is voluntary. Many manufacturers leave it off products that would score badly. Absence of stars on the front is itself a data point.
- It is most useful within a category. Comparing a 4-star wholegrain cracker to a 4-star yoghurt is not the same as comparing them to each other.
For the official Australian Government explanation, healthstarrating.gov.au is the place to look.
The marketing claims that do not mean what you think
Front-of-pack marketing has its own dialect. Half a dozen claims you should treat with healthy scepticism:
- “99% fat-free” — almost always means high-sugar. Look at the carb-and-sugar line.
- “No added sugar” — can still mean very high fruit-juice concentrate, which behaves like sugar in your body.
- “Natural” — has no legal definition in Australia. Means nothing.
- “Made with real fruit” — usually a tiny amount, usually puree. Read the ingredients list.
- “High in protein” — yes, but check what else is high. Many high-protein bars carry as much sugar as a chocolate bar.
- “Multigrain” vs “Wholegrain” — multigrain just means more than one grain. It says nothing about whether the grains are whole. Wholegrain is the meaningful word.
Sugar by another name
Sugar appears under at least twenty different ingredient names. A short list of the ones you will see in Australian products: sucrose, fructose, glucose, dextrose, maltose, lactose, syrup, agave, honey, rice malt, corn syrup, golden syrup, fruit juice concentrate, evaporated cane juice, barley malt, molasses, brown rice syrup, coconut sugar, raw sugar.
If three of these appear in the top eight ingredients, you are eating a sweetened product whatever the marketing says. This is a particularly common pattern in “healthy” snack bars and breakfast cereals.
Comparing two products in thirty seconds
Here is the workflow we use:
- Flip both packets over. Find the per-100g column.
- Compare sugars, sodium, saturated fat. Whichever has the lower number across two of those three wins.
- If they tie, glance at the fibre line — higher is better.
- If they still tie, scan the ingredients list. The one with fewer total ingredients and recognisable words wins.
Thirty seconds. The aisle does not need to take longer than that. For more on building habits that stick around food, our piece on weight loss strategies covers the rest of the routine.
Allergen and origin information
Two pieces of mandatory information are easy to miss but matter a lot.
Allergens. The fourteen major allergens — milk, eggs, wheat, soy, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, crustaceans, molluscs, sesame, lupin, sulphites, cereals containing gluten — must be declared in the ingredients list and in a separate allergen statement. If you have an allergy, read both. Manufacturers sometimes reformulate without flagging the change on the front of the packet.
Country of origin. The Australian “Made in” labelling system shows the percentage of Australian ingredients alongside the kangaroo logo. Two products that look identical on the front can have very different supply chains on the back, which matters to many shoppers and is worth knowing.
For the comprehensive set of label rules, the Food Standards Australia New Zealand site at foodstandards.gov.au is the authoritative reference.
What “low” “reduced” and “lite” actually mean
These terms are legally defined in Australia but the definitions are looser than most shoppers assume.
- “Low fat” — under 3g of fat per 100g.
- “Reduced fat” — at least 25% less fat than the reference product. The reference may still be quite high.
- “Lite” or “Light” — can refer to colour, texture, flavour intensity, OR a nutrient. The packet must say which.
- “Low sugar” — under 5g of sugar per 100g.
- “No added sugar” — no sucrose, fructose or syrup added. Natural sugars (from fruit, milk) can still be very high.
Putting it together
The point of this guide is not to make you a label-reader for the sake of it. It is to make food choices that compound in the right direction less effortful. Spend thirty seconds checking the back of new products you buy, and you will quietly remove a large share of the worst products from your trolley without noticing.
If you want to push further, our fad-free diets guide covers the wider eating patterns that the labelling system can support but cannot replace.
And remember the simple thing: a short ingredients list with recognisable words, a sensible per-100g profile, and a serving size you can actually live with is the formula. The rest is marketing.