The health star rating on food packaging is being slammed as a failure by health advocates, who are calling to make the labels mandatory.
It's meant to help consumers determine what's healthy and what's not, but health advocates say the food sector isn't doing enough to make it work properly.
Health Coalition Aotearoa Food Policy Expert Panel co-chair Dr Sally Mackay told AM it's a system which has been around for a decade, but not enough products actually display the health star rating.
"The health star rating is designed for consumers to be able to choose a healthy choice within a category so if only three out of those 10 products have the health star rating it's not really helping them make a healthy choice," she said.
MacKay said studies had shown consumers were guided towards a healthier choice when the star rating was on a product.
But it's not mandatory so manufacturers tended to only put them on their healthy products.
"You're not going to put it on your less healthy products if you don't have to," MacKay said.
So, that's why she's calling for change to make it mandatory.
"This is a trans-Tasman programme, so it's in Australia as well, and so we are calling for the Governments of both countries to make it mandatory," she said.
"Another option is to have warning labels which is what happens in a lot of Latin American countries - that's mandatory because obviously food manufacturers are not going to choose to do that themselves - and that signals if a product is high in sugar, fat or salt. So that will be another option along with the health star rating."
Mackay said the call comes after the Government had set a target to have health star ratings on half of products by the end of last year but "they're a long way off that".
"Unless it's on more products it's really not going to do the job that it's there for," she said.
"It's been around for 10 years and manufacturers have not done a great job of picking it up so I think mandatory is the only way that we're going to get it on a lot more products."
