Update to the Health Star Rating System (2026): What this means for you.

By Benjamin David APD

You've seen them on the front of cereal boxes, muesli bars and yoghurt tubs, a little badge at the bottom displaying somewhere between half a star and five stars.

The Health Star Rating (HSR) is designed to give you a quick, at-a-glance sense of how a packaged food stacks up nutritionally. But what do the stars actually measure, how are they worked out and can you trust them?

What is the Health Star Rating?

The Health Star Rating is a front-of-pack labelling system introduced across Australia and New Zealand in 2014. It rates packaged foods from 0.5 stars (least healthy) to 5 stars (most healthy), in half-star increments.

The concept is simple: The more stars, the better the nutritional profile.

Its intended purpose is to let you size up a product at a glance without decoding the full nutrition panel on the back.

One thing that's easy to miss is that the rating is designed to help you compare similar products. A breakfast cereal against another, or one yoghurt against another, not to weigh a chocolate bar against a tin of beans.

How is the rating actually calculated?

The official calculator weighs up the "less healthy" parts of a product against the "healthier" parts per 100g (or per 100ml for drinks):

• It counts against a product: energy (kilojoules), saturated fat, total sugars and salt.

• It counts in a product's favour: fruit, vegetables, nuts and legumes, plus protein and fibre.

The final score calculated and converted into a star rating. The healthier the overall mix, the more stars.

The calculator also groups products into types (drinks, dairy foods, oils and spreads, and everything else) and scores each type against its own benchmark. That's why you can only fairly compare similar products.

If you'd like to see it in action, the official Health Star Rating website has a shopper guide, and you can even punch in a product's numbers using their online calculator.

The rating is going mandatory

For its first decade, the Health Star Rating was voluntary and companies could choose whether to print it on their products at all. Many didn't, which led to an obvious catch: the stars tended to show up on products that scored well, while lower-scoring ones quietly left them off.

By the end of 2025, only about 39% of eligible products in Australia carried a rating, well short of the 70% target governments had set. So in early 2026, food ministers agreed to make the system mandatory, a move backed by around 80% of Australians.

How to use Health Star Ratings when you shop

Used well, the stars are a genuinely handy tool. Here's how to get the most out of them:

• Compare like with like. Line up two muesli bars, two loaves of bread or two pasta sauces, and let the stars help you choose the better option within that group.

• Don't compare across categories. A 4-star flavoured milk isn't automatically "healthier" than a 2.5-star block of cheese. They're scored against completely different benchmarks.

• Treat the stars as a starting point, not the final verdict. Flip the pack over and scan the ingredients list and Nutrition Information Panel, paying attention to sugars and sodium.

• Mind your portion size. Ratings are based on 100g or 100mL, but you might eat much more (or less) than that in one sitting. A small can of soft drink is a good example.

The limitations you should know

The Health Star Rating is useful, but it isn't flawless, and understanding its blind spots makes you a sharper shopper.

The biggest criticism is that the algorithm doesn't account for ultra-processing. Because manufacturers can claw back modifying points by adding fibre, protein, or a little fruit and vegetable content, some heavily processed foods can score surprisingly well. A sugary breakfast cereal fortified with added fibre, for instance, can pick up a respectable rating despite being a long way from a whole food.

Diet drinks are another quirk: by swapping sugar for artificial sweeteners, they can score well even though they offer little genuine nutritional value.

And while the system is becoming mandatory, the underlying formula still carries these loopholes. Public health groups continue to push for the algorithm to be tightened so the stars more honestly reflect how processed a food really is.

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Ben is an Accredited Practising Dietitian (APD) who helps everyday Australians cut through the confusion of food labels and make healthier choices at the supermarket. He knows that systems like the Health Star Rating can raise as many questions as they answer, and he's here to help you understand what's really in your food so you can make evidence-based decisions that suit your health, your budget and your lifestyle.

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