FSANZ labelling for imported products: what US and UK packs get wrong in Australia
By Built for Retail · Last reviewed 2026-07-19
The answer
Six things, most often: the country-of-origin marking is missing or in the wrong format, the US Nutrition Facts panel is not a nutrition information panel, allergens are not declared in the required plain English form, the date mark is in the wrong style and order, the quantity statement is not metric, and the pack carries no Australian supplier name and address. Every one is fixable in a single audited artwork round. Found one at a time, each is its own print run, and a buyer or a border inspection will find them before your customers do.
Your home label does not carry, and buyers find out first
A pack that is fully compliant in Portland or Manchester is usually non-compliant in Melbourne. Australian food labelling runs on the Food Standards Code plus two companion regimes, country-of-origin marking under its own information standard and trade measurement rules for the quantity statement, and none of the three defers to FDA or UK practice. The commercial consequence arrives before the regulatory one: Australian buyers read the pack before the pitch, so a non-localised label does not just carry compliance risk, it loses the range review.
For food, there is a second reader. Imported food can be inspected at the border, and labelling is one of the things the inspection checks. That border process sits with your customs broker and advisers, not with us. Our job is the retail half: a pack that passes the Code and your target retailer's pack guide, so there is nothing for anyone to find.
The six failures, in the order they get found
These are the gaps that show up again and again when offshore artwork meets an Australian audit. None of them is exotic. All of them are on the pack you already printed.
The steps, in order
- 01Country-of-origin marking. Food sold in Australia carries origin marking under its own information standard, and imported food generally needs a clearly framed statement of origin in the standard's prescribed format. 'Product of USA' printed wherever the designer had space is not automatically compliant.
- 02The nutrition panel. The Australian nutrition information panel is a prescribed table, per serving and per 100 grams, with energy in kilojoules. A US Nutrition Facts panel, per serving with calories and daily values, does not satisfy it and cannot be converted by translation alone. UK packs start closer but still need checking line by line.
- 03Allergens. Plain English allergen labelling requires the prescribed allergen names, emphasised in the ingredient list, plus a separate contains statement. Home-market phrasing and folk wording like 'may contain traces' do not meet the requirement.
- 04Date marking. Australia uses best-before or use-by wording in a prescribed form, with the date in day, month, year order. 'Best if used by' in US month-first order fails on the wording and the date order at once.
- 05Quantity. Trade measurement rules require a metric quantity statement in the prescribed position and print size. Ounces can appear as a supplementary marking, but a pack that leads with net wt oz does not comply.
- 06Name and address. The pack must carry the name and Australian street address of the supplier, typically your importer or local distributor. A US or UK head-office address does not satisfy the requirement.
The NIP is a rebuild, not a translation
The nutrition information panel deserves its own warning because it is the item founders most often underestimate. Building it usually means going back to the nutritional data, restating it per 100 grams as well as per serving, converting energy to kilojoules, and applying the Code's rounding and formatting rules. If your serving size was chosen for US daily-value optics, it may need rethinking for an Australian shelf too.
The front of the pack is part of the same job. Nutrition content claims, the 'high protein' and 'no added sugar' flashes, are themselves regulated in Australia, with conditions a product has to meet before the claim can appear. An audit that only reads the back of the pack misses half the risk, which is why ours reads the front just as closely.
The artwork-round economics
The expensive way to localise a label is serially: discover a rule, fix it, reprint, discover the next one. Every discovery is a plate change, a print run and possibly a write-off of stock in the old pack. The cheap way is one audit of every SKU against the Code, origin marking, trade measurement and the retailer's pack guide, producing a gap register with every issue, its rule, its cost and its lead time, then one managed artwork round that fixes everything at once, and a print transition timed so existing stock sells through instead of being binned.
For a first shipment, a compliant over-label can sometimes bridge the gap while the offshore print run catches up, provided it is applied cleanly and your retailer accepts it. Treat that as a bridge, not a strategy. It adds a per-unit cost and a failure mode, and a buyer holding two competing submissions will notice which pack was built for this market.
What sits outside our lane, named plainly
Some products that sell as ordinary shelf goods at home are therapeutic goods in Australia: listed medicines, many supplements, sunscreens above the cosmetic level, some medicated skincare. Therapeutic goods carry their own labelling regime under the TGA, and that work is scoped to the specialist regulatory consultants it requires. We coordinate it; we do not improvise it. If your product is anywhere near that boundary, settling which regime it falls under is the first question, because the answer changes everything after it.
The border is the other boundary. Import clearance, the imported food inspection scheme and biosecurity are your customs broker's and advisers' territory. We run the label to the Code and coordinate our timeline with theirs, which is exactly the division a clean launch needs.
Where to start
Send the current artwork and the target retailer, and the audit tells you exactly what stands between your pack and their shelf. Full detail on scope sits on our packaging and compliance service page, and the wider market-entry picture is on our Enter Australia page.
For brands modelling the whole entry, the pack audit runs inside the Retail-Readiness Sprint as the compliance gap list: a fixed fee, $15,000 for a single-retailer scope or $25,000 multi-retailer, about four weeks, covering your trade spend, pricing waterfall, review calendar and the costed gap register. The Sprint is indicative and does not guarantee ranging. The buyer decides, and a localised pack is the first thing they check.
Questions founders ask
Can we sell our US pack in Australia unchanged?
Almost never. The nutrition panel format, allergen declarations, date marking, origin marking, metric quantity and the Australian supplier address each differ from US practice, and buyers read the pack before the pitch. Audit every SKU against the Food Standards Code before committing stock or artwork.
Are UK labels closer to compliant than US ones?
Usually closer, never compliant. Per-100-gram nutrition and allergen emphasis are familiar to a UK pack, but origin marking, the Australian supplier address, date and trade measurement details, and the Code's exact panel format still need work. Closer is not compliant, and the audit is the same either way.
Can a sticker over-label fix a non-compliant pack?
As a bridge for a first shipment, sometimes, if it is applied cleanly and your retailer accepts it. It adds per-unit cost and a failure mode, so plan the properly localised print run in parallel and use the over-label to buy time, not to avoid the artwork.
Do supplements follow the same food labelling rules?
It depends on how the product is classified in Australia. Formulated foods sit under the Food Standards Code; listed medicines and other therapeutic goods sit under the TGA with their own labelling regime, which we scope to specialist regulatory consultants. Settle the classification first, because it changes the whole compliance path.
Who checks imported food labels at the border?
Imported food can be inspected under the imported food inspection scheme, and labelling is among the things checked. That process sits with your customs broker and advisers. The retailer's own quality process reads the pack as well, so the label has to pass twice, which is the argument for auditing it once, properly.
Compliance
Labelling, barcodes and retail-ready formats, audited against the Food Standards Code and your target retailer's pack guide, then fixed: artwork managed, barcodes verified, cartons marked, and the print transition timed so you are not binning stock.
Scope, price, processOr use the contact form at the bottom of this page. It lands straight in our inbox.
General information, not advice for your specific brand. Figures are market-typical ranges; your Sprint models your real ones. Written by the Built for Retail team.
