This is part of a run of pieces we are writing about labels: what is on them, what the words are allowed to mean, and how to get something useful out of them without standing in the aisle for ten minutes. If you want the groundwork first, start with our guide to reading a nutrition panel. This one is about the front of the pack.
The front of a pack is advertising
This is obvious when you say it out loud, and very easy to forget while you are actually shopping.
Every word on the front of a pack was chosen by someone whose job is to sell you the product. The photography, the colours, the phrase across the middle. None of it is required to be there, and all of it was decided on because it works.
The back is the opposite. The nutrition panel and the ingredient list appear because the law requires them, in a format the law specifies. Nobody at the company chose to include them, and nobody chose what they say.
That is the difference worth carrying with you. One side is a pitch. The other is a disclosure.
And this is not a handful of questionable brands. When researchers surveyed three ordinary supermarket categories in Sydney, around three quarters of products carried some kind of claim on the front. In the same survey, a third of the products making health claims did not meet the nutrient profiling criteria that are supposed to apply to them.
Two kinds of claim
Once you are reading the front as advertising, the next useful step is noticing that not all of it works the same way.
Some claims have a line behind them. Others are only a comparison. They sit side by side in the same aisle, in the same font, and they do very different things.
Low sugar has a number behind it
To put low sugar on a label in Australia, a product has to meet a fixed threshold. No more than 2.5g of sugar per 100mL for a liquid, and no more than 5g per 100g for a solid food.
That is a real line. Every product carrying those words has to sit under it, which means low sugar on one pack means the same thing as low sugar on another.
Reduced sugar does not
Reduced sugar, or less sugar, works completely differently. There is no threshold to clear. The claim only tells you the product has less sugar than something else, and that something else is almost always the ordinary version of the same product.
So a biscuit with meaningfully less sugar than the original biscuit qualifies. That is all the claim is saying. It can still contain more sugar than a plain biscuit on the next shelf that makes no claim at all, and both labels would be entirely accurate.
The words are doing exactly what they say. The difficulty is that they do not read that way when you are halfway down an aisle with a trolley.
Where the kilojoules go
There is a second part to this that surprises people more than the first.
When sugar comes out of a product, something generally goes in to take its place, because sugar is not only sweetness. It provides bulk, texture, browning and shelf life. The replacements might be sugar alcohols, fibres, starches or non-nutritive sweeteners, and several of those carry kilojoules of their own.
A 2025 analysis of baked goods and breakfast cereals put numbers on it. Among products carrying a no added sugar claim, 49 per cent had more energy in them than the products they were being compared with. Among reduced sugar products, 23 per cent did.
Less sugar had not meant less of everything else. In a good number of cases it had meant more.
And some phrases mean nothing at all
Lightly sweetened is not a defined term. Neither are most of the softer phrases in that family. They mean whatever the person writing the pack would like them to mean, which is worth knowing before you let one of them decide anything.
This is not only about sugar
Here is the part worth carrying out of this post, because it applies down every aisle.
Fat works exactly the same way. Low fat has a line behind it: under 3g per 100g for a food, under 1.5g per 100mL for a drink. Reduced fat has no line, it just means at least 25 per cent less fat than the standard version. If the standard version was a high fat food, the reduced one very often still is.
Salt (or sodium) follows the same pattern, and so does everything else that comes in a low version and a reduced version.
Light and lite are the slipperiest of all, because they do not have to be about nutrition at all. Light can mean lighter in fat, or salt, or sugar, or kilojoules. It can also mean lighter in colour, in texture, or in taste. Light olive oil is the example that catches the most people, since it is usually light in colour and flavour rather than in fat.
The label has to state which characteristic makes the product light, so the information is there. It is just rarely where your eye lands first.
FSANZ has done consumer research on this, and found people generally assumed a light claim referred to whichever nutrient most needed reducing, which for most products meant fat. That assumption is doing a lot of unearned work.
One more worth knowing
Cholesterol free, low cholesterol and no cholesterol on a plant food are technically true and completely uninformative. Plant foods contain virtually no cholesterol to begin with, so the claim on an oil or a margarine is describing something that was never going to be there.
It is not a false statement. It is just a claim with nothing behind it, and a good example of how something can be true and still tell you nothing.
Fat out, sugar and salt in
There is a mirror image of the sugar problem here. When fat is removed from a product, sugar and salt often go in to replace it, because fat carries a great deal of the flavour and the texture.
So a low fat version of something can arrive with more sugar than the original. Which is why the answer is never to read one number on the front, but to look at the panel as a whole.
What to do with this
None of this is a reason to distrust everything you pick up, and it is certainly not a reason to be frightened of sugar. It is a reason to treat the front of the pack as a comparison and the back of the pack as a measurement. The per 100g column is where you settle it, and that is the habit worth building.
And if you want to know which packs are worth turning over first, here is where the sugar in an ordinary weekly shop tends to sit.
The takeaway: Low claims have a fixed threshold behind them. Low sugar means no more than 2.5g per 100mL for liquids or 5g per 100g for solids, and low fat means under 1.5g per 100mL or 3g per 100g. Reduced claims have no threshold at all, they simply mean at least 25 per cent less than a comparable product, usually the original version of the same thing. Light can refer to colour, texture or taste rather than nutrition. The front of the pack is a comparison. The back is a measurement, and that holds for sugar, fat and salt alike.
The science behind this post:
- Food Standards Australia New Zealand. Sugar labelling. A low sugar claim requires no more than 2.5g of sugar per 100mL of liquid food or 5g per 100g of solid food. foodstandards.gov.au
- Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code, Standard 1.2.7: Nutrition, health and related claims, and Schedule 4. Conditions for nutrition content claims including reduced sugar, no added sugar and unsweetened. foodstandards.gov.au
- Observational survey of nutrition and health claims on packaged foods in three categories in Sydney supermarkets, 2011 and 2016. Public Health Nutrition. Found around 76 per cent of products carried claims, and 34 per cent of those making health claims did not meet the nutrient profiling criteria.
- Diabetes Australia. Food claims: fact or fiction. Low fat requires less than 3g of fat per 100g for foods and less than 1.5g per 100mL for drinks. Reduced fat requires at least 25 per cent less fat than the standard product. diabetesaustralia.com.au
- Better Health Channel, Victorian Department of Health. Food labels. Light and lite may refer to fat, salt, sugar or kilojoules, or to texture, colour or taste. The characteristic must be stated on the label. Cholesterol claims on plant foods are uninformative since plant foods contain virtually no cholesterol. betterhealth.vic.gov.au
- Wang YF, et al. (2025). Disconnection between sugars reduction and calorie reduction in baked goods and breakfast cereals with sugars-related nutrient content claims in the Canadian marketplace. Frontiers in Nutrition, 12.
- Food Standards Australia New Zealand. Proposal P1062: Defining added sugars for claims. Revised conditions for no added sugar and unsweetened claims, with a four-year transition period. foodstandards.gov.au