Digital product labelling enabled under law change, with FSANZ constraints and equity concerns flagged

Regulations Minister David Seymour has announced the introduction of digital product labelling in Aotearoa New Zealand, allowing businesses to provide real-time updates to product labels through a national standard aligned with current global practice.

The change stems from the Ministry for Regulation's Product Labelling Review, the ministry's fifth sector review, which had its terms of reference published in October 2025 after being announced in August that year. Cabinet has now agreed to progress a focused package of changes from the review, including enabling digital labelling and strengthening food and beverage labelling (Ministry for Regulation).

Seymour said the digital labelling law change would lower costs and save space currently taken up by physical labels. Digital labels would not replace physical labelling but would give businesses the option to adopt the current global standard, he said (RNZ). A national standard for digital labelling is being developed and is expected to generate $111 million over 10 years.

Over-the-counter medicine labelling will be aligned with Australia's labelling requirements as part of the package. However, Seymour said changes to food product labelling would not move as fast because of New Zealand's commitment to Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ). That trans-Tasman arrangement means food labelling changes run through a joint regulatory process rather than being adjustable unilaterally.

The Government had earlier signalled its direction. In March 2026 it announced it would move ahead with a digital labelling trial as part of its product labelling changes (Beehive). Prior to that, the Ministry for Primary Industries had proposed enabling a limited trial of digital labelling on certain imported food products, under which consumers must be provided with all feasible information required by the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code as a digital label (MPI).

Product labels list ingredients, expiry dates and safety warnings, and are essential for keeping customers safe and informed, according to the Ministry for Regulation (Ministry for Regulation). The move to digital labelling is framed around giving businesses more flexibility in how that information is delivered.

Consumer NZ has warned that the new QR codes could be inequitable, leaving people without device access unable to get label information (RNZ). That concern speaks to a practical access question: if critical safety or allergen information sits behind a scanned code, those without smartphones or data connectivity lose a channel they currently have on-pack.

Seymour said decisions on the rest of the product labelling review were yet to be made. The Cabinet package is a focused subset of the review's findings rather than a full government response, which leaves open how far digital labelling will extend across product categories beyond medicines and the food products covered by the FSANZ process.

The broader context here is that the Ministry for Regulation, established to scrutinise and streamline regulatory regimes, has been working through sector reviews that feed directly into Cabinet decision-making. The product labelling review moved from terms of reference to Cabinet agreement in roughly 11 months, a timeline that reflects the relatively contained scope of the changes agreed so far. The $111 million figure attached to the national standard is an expected benefit over a decade, not a cost estimate, and reflects the cumulative efficiency gains the government anticipates from businesses adopting digital labels.

What will matter for stakeholders is the pace at which the national standard is finalised and how the physical-label requirement interacts with the digital option in practice. Consumer NZ's equity flag is the sharpest policy tension in the package: the government has opted to keep physical labels mandatory, which addresses the access concern at one level, but the degree to which digital labels supplement rather than dilute on-pack information will depend on the standard's drafting. For food manufacturers, the FSANZ constraint means the fastest-moving parts of this package will apply to non-food products and over-the-counter medicines, not to the food and beverage categories where labelling changes are most visible to consumers.