The national ‘Go for 2 & 5’ campaign got Australians eating a full extra serve of fruit and veg a day. Then it ended, and health star ratings quietly took its place. It’s time to bring back what worked!
This year, Australia’s Food Ministers voted to begin the process of making the Health Star Rating mandatory on packaged foods. The decision came after years of poor voluntary uptake. By the end of 2025, only around 37% of eligible products in Australia carried a star rating, a long way short of the 70% target governments set back in 2020. Food Standards Australia New Zealand has now been asked to amend the Food Standards Code, with public consultations to follow.
The announcement was welcomed by the Australian Medical Association, Cancer Council and other public health bodies, and polling suggests around 4 in 5 Australians support a mandatory scheme. The AMA has kept up the pressure since, calling on the federal government in July to hold industry to the change.
ProVeg Australia supports clear, honest food labelling. But we want to be clear about what this reform will not do.
Star ratings compare packets, not diets
The Health Star Rating was designed to help shoppers compare similar packaged products on the supermarket shelf. Is this ice-cream better than that one? Which frozen hashbrowns have less sodium?
This system operates entirely within the packaged food aisles. Fresh broccoli, bananas and apples don’t carry labels at all, so the scheme has nothing to say about them. A shopper can dutifully choose four-star products all week and still eat a diet with barely any fresh vegetables, legumes or whole grains in it.
That gap matters, because the biggest health and environmental gains available to Australia come from eating more of exactly those foods. Most Australians fall well short of the recommended vegetable intake, and no amount of relabelling breakfast cereal will change that.
In the absence of anything else, voluntary Health Star Ratings have quietly become Australia’s de facto national nutrition communication policy. Making them mandatory entrenches that role without fixing the underlying problem: we have a labelling policy where we need a food policy.
We used to do this, and it worked
Australia has run a serious national campaign to get people eating more fruit and vegetables before. The “Go for 2 & 5” campaign began in Western Australia in 2002, was adopted nationally, and ran until 2012. Its message was simple: two serves of fruit and five serves of vegetables a day.
It was also properly evaluated. Independent surveys covering more than 20,000 Western Australian adults found that over the first three years of the campaign, average fruit and vegetable consumption rose by a combined 0.8 serves per person per day, with vegetables accounting for most of the increase. Awareness of the recommended daily serves rose sharply, and when the campaign expanded to other states, tracking research found awareness above 70%, with more than a quarter of respondents saying they had actively tried to eat more fruit and vegetables.
Tellingly, when the mass media advertising stopped, consumption began to slip. That is not a failure of the approach. It is evidence that sustained public communication moves eating habits, and that abandoning it has a cost. Australia has now gone well over a decade without any comparable national effort.
What we recommend instead
ProVeg Australia recommends the federal government launch a national public marketing campaign for plant-rich diets, funded and sustained at a scale comparable to Go for 2 & 5.
At best, star ratings help Australians pick the better packet. A national campaign for plant-rich eating would help them pick up more fruit and vegetables in the first place. That is the reform that belongs on the table, and it has been missing for over a decade.
