Ministers have strong appetite for food labelling shake-up
Saturday, 4 October 2025
A raft of health and product information that needs to be displayed on food and drink labels could best be moved online, Food Safety Minister Andrew Hoggard has suggested.
Hoggard has piled in behind Economic Growth Minister Nicola Willis, who has argued that changing the way importers can adhere to local labelling requirements could improve competition and cut prices at the check-outs.
But he is reassuring people with health allergies that some mandatory information would probably continue to need to be printed on packaging, such as any information that food items might contain traces of nuts.
“You may need to leave some critical information on there that could kill someone if they don’t see it and have an allergic reaction, but all the rest of it, quite frankly, could just be put online.”
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Willis announced in August that the Government had been looking at the provisions in the Food Act that currently require New Zealand to have specific food labelling rules that align with Australia.
That review was in the context of improving supermarket competition.
“One of the issues for potential entrants is they think the way to be competitive is to source products from alternative supply chains to those used by Woolworths and Foodstuffs,” she said.
“The challenge they face is New Zealand rightly has its own specific labelling requirements, which are different from, say, the US, UK or Asia.”
It is understood British frozen food giant and supermarket operator Iceland at one stage discussed supplying an iwi-backed supermarket group, before that initiative was put on hold in the wake of the last election.
Willis said it was “really important to keep ensuring every consumer has very good information about what they're eating”.
“But we're looking at whether there are options using new technology. For example, could you scan a ‘QR code’ at the aisle so that if you wanted the New Zealand-based label, it was available digitally?”
Hoggard told The Post he believed accessing product information that way would generally be the way of the future.
He had raised the topic with trans-Tasman regulatory body Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (Fsanz) a few months ago without push-back and would be taking a paper to its next meeting, he said.
“Talking to food businesses, we're getting to a point where labelling changes can be a major cost impediment to them and an absolute frustration.”
He said he had recently attended a whisky tasting. “Looking at all the stuff they are expected to have on the label, there is not a lot of room left to say ‘this is a single malt whisky’.
“There are all these warning labels and the rest of it.”
Hoggard said he received letters on the issue on a weekly basis.
Making changes through Fsanz could be a lengthy process, “but in the meantime, we're certainly looking at how we can come up with some options that might enable a bit more sensibility in this space”, he said.
The solution might be QR codes or “3D barcodes” on products that automatically displayed the statutory information that needed to be provided in the country in which it was scanned.
Not everyone had a smartphone or went shopping with one, he agreed.
“But you don't want to hold back solutions just because not everyone's there with the technology.”
Technology could be used in a similar way to automatically warn at the check-out if a product was past its use-by date, or to later advise a customer if it was subject to a safety recall, he suggested.
“There are moves towards this technology and I believe there is discussion happening around standards for this, so it's definitely the way of the future.”