Will Health Star Ratings become a referendum on ultra processed foods?

On 13 February 2026, the Food Ministers of Australia and New Zealand announced that the process by which the Health Star Rating could become mandatory through introduction into the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code (the Food Standards Code).

This very process, run by Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ), requires two rounds of public consultation which will subject the Health Star Rating “calculator” to a level of scientific, regulatory and commercial scrutiny that it has managed to avoid to date by being voluntary. Prior even to this announcement, there has been much lobbying for the Health Star Ratings to reflect (and punish) “ultra processed foods”.

This article explores whether the Health Star Ratings can in fact do that, even if they become mandatory.

The most significant change to food regulation in a decade

Separate to the potential interaction between Health Star Ratings and ultra processed foods, there is no doubt that if Health Star Ratings do become mandatory then this will be the most significant regulatory change to food since the introduction of the mandatory country of origin information standard in 2016. Even more so than the introduction of the health claims standard in 2013, because that standard only had the most significant impact on products making voluntary claims, not all packaged products.

Making Health Star Ratings mandatory will impact every packaged food product made or imported into and sold in Australia and New Zealand. The scale of the regulatory impact is not just on the number of SKUs it will affect, but additionally because it would be the first mandatory food labelling obligation in Australia or New Zealand (beyond trade measurement marks) that states where on pack it will be applied – namely, the front of pack. This means that every compliantly imported food product will now need its own label printed for Australia and New Zealand (which are small markets on the global scale) or will require over-stickers applied to both the back and front of pack, which will greatly increase the cost of compliance.

Finally, by design, this front of pack labelling obligation will influence how Australian and New Zealand customers will perceive the “healthiness” of a product. As the slogan for the Health Star Ratings alleges: “The more stars, the healthier the choice”.

Can the Health Star Rating algorithm change?

Foods are attributed health stars based on the calculator or algorithm (the HSR calculator) adopted by the Health Star Rating Advisory Committee and, as with any line drawn by regulation, there is a much debate as to whether the calculator genuinely attributes more stars to healthier choices.

The HSR calculator only takes into account certain whole of diet nutritional factors – eat more protein, fibre, fruit and vegetables while reducing energy, sugar, salt and saturated fat – whilst failing to factor in individual food matrices.

Admittedly, there are only so many factors the HSR calculator can be reasonably expected to take in whilst still be enforceable. If the HSR cannot be calculated from a product’s nutrition information panel, it will be impossible to resource its enforcement as that would require regulators seeking further information from each supplier about every single packaged food product.

However, there is a fundamental failing to the Health Star Ratings: it categorises food products and attributes stars differently depending on the category of a food product. So, “the more stars, the healthier the choice” only applies when comparing foods within a specific category defined by the HSR calculator. Categories that have little bearing to how consumers understand food.

Put another way: more stars does not necessarily mean healthier when comparing foods of different categories. The Food Ministers themselves noted that consumers have “persistent misunderstandings” on this front. FSANZ’s own consumer research conducted in 2025 found that “more than half of participants incorrectly chose that the HSR can be used to compare dissimilar products (AU 52 – 72%; NZ 50 – 62%)”.

No one is pretending the calculator is perfect. There was a significant amendment following widespread concern on Health Stars being calculated on foods “when prepared” as opposed to when sold. This led to a well-known Australian brand removing its Health Star Rating, as its 4.5 rating would have changed to 1.5.

In 2019, the five-year review of the Health Star Ratings system led to some recommended tweaks around the edges of the HSR calculator, but no changes since then. Importantly, even in 2019, there was strong lobbying for added sugars to be rated differently to naturally-occurring sugars. That work was deferred for FSANZ to do its work on whether added sugars should be added to nutrition information panels. This work was in turn deferred until FSANZ conducted a full review into nutrition labelling… which has ultimately found that including added sugars is unnecessary.

To sum up, there is a backlog of changes to the calculator being demanded by both the food industry and health advocates, not least factoring in ultra-processed foods. Not only will the FSANZ proposal process give stakeholders a place to voice these demands, but FSANZ is required by law to consider them in light of various factors that were not required of the Health Star Rating Advisory Council.

While passing no judgement on the work done by the Health Star Rating Advisory Committee on the HSR calculator, in amending the Food Standards Code, FSANZ is required by law for any standard it develops “to be based on risk analysis using the best available scientific evidence”. Additionally, FSANZ must also consider:

• the promotion of consistency between domestic and international food standards;
• the desirability of an efficient and internationally competitive food industry;
• the promotion of fair trading in food;
• any written policy guidelines formulated by the Forum on Food Regulation for the purposes of this paragraph and notified to the Authority.

While the last factor is undeniably going to impact FSANZ decision-making (it will be hard to imagine a world where FSANZ decides that the burden on industry outweighs the preventative health objectives being mandated by the Food Ministers) it is similarly hard to imagine the HSR calculator not being changed following two rounds of public consultation.

Will the science and health advocacy against UPFs be considered the “best available scientific evidence”? And if so, can the “ultra” processing of food be factored into the HSR calculator in way that accurately portrays each food product? And can the HSR calculator be so fundamentally altered that it will actually deliver on “more stars, the healthier the choice”?

Can the Health Star Rating calculator reflect food processing?

The term “ultra-processed foods” arises from the NOVA classification system developed in 2009. In this classification system, “ultra processed foods” are distinguished from just “processed” foods (which just have salt, sugar and oils added to them to preserve them or make them more palatable) by additional processing and being made up predominantly from food extracts and industrial chemicals, as opposed to whole food ingredients.

Lobbying for government intervention into regulations of UPFs has increased significantly in Australia since publication in late 2025 of a series of articles in the Lancet that identified both Australia’s high consumption of UPFs and their connection with diet-related chronic diseases. Even before the Lancet articles, the George Institute was advocating factoring in NOVA classification to the HSR calculator.

As lawyers, it is not KHQ’s role to question the science behind UPFs. However, we can comment on the possible HSR regulation and make the following observations:

• The same food processing technologies that can make food less healthy and less nutritious but more attractive, tasty (and arguably more profitable) can also make food safer, improve its nutritional profile, and make it more affordable. The George Institute itself observes that some foods that meet the definitions of UPF do not seem to be associated with poorer health outcomes, such as wholegrain breads and similar cereal and grain products. In short, it might not be the processing that is the issue, but the objective the processing seeks to achieve. If that is the case, how will an objective be regulated or enforceable?
• Speaking of enforcement, it may be impossible to tell from a product’s appearance whether it is a “processed” food or an “ultra-processed” food. If the rollout of the new country of origin labelling logo proved nothing else, it proved that the cost of enforcement and compliance significantly outweighed the consumer information benefits. Years after the rollout, KHQ now rarely hears of the ACCC auditing companies for their country of origin percentages.
• The HSR calculator itself is designed to reward the reformulation of foods to improve the nutritional profile. This very reformulation, that is the point of the Health Star Rating, could move a product from being “processed” to “ultra processed”. If reformulation to improve nutritional profile will not achieve a net benefit in health stars, will this reduce R&D investment in improving the nutritional profile of products?
• Given that UPF classification affects whole categories of foods and the HSR rating applies category-by-category, will there be products that can actually compete and distinguish themselves? Will there be a pasta sauce or packaged bread or breakfast cereal or yoghurt that can get a better health star rating by using less processing or fewer technological ingredients? And will that star rating improve sales of a product to the point where it justifies the cost?
• Assuming that foods are only ultra-processed to improve shelf-life and profitability (a big assumption), foods that are less processed will by extension have a shorter shelf life, require more quality and temperature controls, and are currently more expensive to buy and more time-consuming to prepare. The very people who can afford more expensive food and have time to prepare it tend to be the same people who have the luxury of choosing foods on the basis of their healthiness anyway, and not on the basis of their cost or convenience.

As reported in The Guardian, the Lancet series on UPFs calls for a holistic approach: “Alongside policies to address the supply chain, the authors called for policies to support the availability and affordability of fresh and minimally processed foods, and to address the socioeconomic and gender inequalities that drive demand for UPFs.”

The Health Star Rating will no doubt be under significant pressure to incorporate NOVA classifications into its calculator. A key question for FSANZ in its assessment is whether such incorporations will in fact achieve the public health outcome of making people make healthier diet choices. A key question for the Food Ministers is how to support the availability and affordability of fresh and minimally processed foods, something that no mandatory labelling regulation will affect.

Want Food & Beverage updates delivered straight to your inbox? Click here to subscribe.