Digital product labels: What the Government's new labelling rules mean

Regulations Minister David Seymour has announced that businesses in Aotearoa New Zealand will be able to use digital product labels, letting them update information like ingredients and safety warnings in real time through a national standard that lines up with international practice.

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

Digital labels work by putting product information behind a code — typically a QR code — that consumers scan with a phone. Seymour said the law change would lower costs and save the physical space taken up by printed labels. Digital labels would not replace physical ones but would give businesses the option to use the 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 brought into line with Australia's requirements as part of the package. But Seymour said food product labelling changes would move more slowly because of New Zealand's involvement in Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) — a joint body that sets food standards on both sides of the Tasman. That arrangement means food labelling changes go through a shared regulatory process rather than being something New Zealand can change on its own.

The Government had already signalled the direction. In March 2026 it announced it would proceed with a digital labelling trial as part of its product labelling changes (Beehive). Before that, the Ministry for Primary Industries had proposed a limited trial of digital labelling on certain imported food products, under which consumers would still get all the 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 shift to digital labelling is about giving businesses more flexibility in how that information reaches consumers.

Consumer NZ has warned that the new QR codes could be inequitable, leaving people without device access unable to get label information (RNZ). The concern is straightforward: if critical safety or allergen information sits behind a scanned code, people without smartphones or data connectivity lose a channel they currently have on the physical 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, set up 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 relatively fast turnaround that reflects the 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 kept 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.