23 March 2015
Highlighting home-grown
Australian shoppers are fed up with confusing food labels and want honest and clearer country of origin descriptions on their groceries, but that goal may not be as simple as it sounds.
While the federal government has promised to soon release a better labelling code to clearly identify differences between imports and products grown or made in Australia, it's unlikely to tell the full story, according to "buy Australian" advocate and advertising promoter Brett Watson.
Mr Watson believed the government favoured sticking with the widely-recognised "Australian made" gold kangaroo icon on a green triangle as the basis for identifying local product.
However, because many foods or other goods used imported ingredients, the logo was likely to be modified to emphasise local content with a barometer bar underneath showing varying degrees of gold colouring to indicate how much content was sourced locally.
But that would still only tell half the story, said northern NSW-based Mr Watson, who began promoting his own version of the "buy Australian" message in 1997, re-launching it in 2012.
He noted that even if a food product was largely grown in Australia it could still be part-processed overseas, and consumers received no clear indication of whether the manufacturer was a local or overseas-owned business.
So much of Australia's processed food or other manufactured goods were now sourced or part-produced offshore it was almost impossible to assume a mainstream supermarket line was 100 per cent Australian product, or the company making it was 100pc Australian.
The need for simple "fair dinkum" food labelling has been a political catch-cry issue for years, but the government has revved up its interest in clearing up the confusion since contaminated fruit from China was recently detected in what most shoppers thought was an Australian frozen food product.
"Trying to support local ownership is just as important as buying local product for many consumers," said Lismore-based Mr Watson, who also has a farm at Tenterfield.
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