When a star rating becomes a political event
New Zealand and Australia rolled out a mandatory Health Star Rating system this month. The idea is sensible enough: a one-to-five star score on the front of packaged food, calculated from a publicly available formula, designed to help shoppers compare like-for-like products without reading the back-of-pack nutrition label.
The unintended consequence, foreseeable by literally anyone who had thought about it for thirty seconds, is that the system has rekindled the eternal Marmite-versus-Vegemite war and dragged it directly into Wellington politics. NZ Marmite (which, just to be clear for British readers, is made by Sanitarium and is a sweeter, less concentrated product than the British Marmite we are used to) scored a 2.5. Vegemite, which contains no added sugar, scored a 4.
You can imagine how this has gone down.
The political layer
NZ Finance Minister Nicola Willis used her weekly press conference last Wednesday to mention, with a small smile, that the new Health Star data was an “interesting indicator of value for money” and that, in her household, the family had moved to Vegemite. This is the political equivalent of stepping into a swimming pool fully clothed and pretending it was an accident.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, on the same day, was asked by a reporter whether he agreed. He said, without hesitation, that he was a Marmite man and always would be, that the Health Star Rating system measured one narrow thing and was not the only consideration in selecting a breakfast spread, and that “if Marmite is good enough for King Charles, it is good enough for me”. This is, I should note, not how the British Royal Family describe Marmite, and there is no public record of King Charles eating any of it, but Luxon was committed and stayed in.
By Friday the row had its own hashtag, its own panel show segments, and three opinion pieces in the New Zealand Herald with titles like “What our spread choices say about us” and “The Marmite divide and the future of New Zealand”. I am not making this up. The country has, formally, lost the plot.
A small dig at Kiwi Marmite
Have you ever tried Kiwi Marmite? It is fine. It is, in fact, perfectly pleasant, in a sweetish caramel-tinged way, if you grew up with it. But let us not pretend, on either side of the spread aisle, that it is the same product as British Marmite. The British version is darker, denser, more bitter, more concentrated, and more frankly itself. The Kiwi version is the version you make when the brewery yeast supply ran out in 1919 (which it did, when shipping from Britain was disrupted by the war) and Sanitarium had to improvise with a different yeast base.
This is genuinely useful background for the current row. The reason NZ Marmite has more sugar than Vegemite is partly recipe, partly heritage, partly the fact that the Sanitarium product was always sweetened to suit antipodean palates. The British Marmite, for what it is worth, would also score lower than Vegemite under HSR, but probably not by as much.
What this tells us about food labelling
The Health Star Rating system does what it was designed to do. It produces a single comparable number that lets a shopper distinguish between Vegemite and NZ Marmite without doing arithmetic. That is, in a labelling-policy sense, a success.
What it cannot do, and probably should not be expected to do, is capture brand identity, cultural significance, or the question of whether you like the taste of the product. NZ Marmite at 2.5 stars is still NZ Marmite. Vegemite at 4 stars is still Vegemite. Anyone who switches from one to the other on the basis of the rating alone, without testing whether they like the alternative, is going to be in for a rude breakfast.
The rating is also not a permanent verdict. Sanitarium, who make NZ Marmite, have already indicated they may reformulate to reduce sugar, partly because the rating shamed them into it, partly because the sugar-tax conversation in Australia is heating up again. A 2027 reformulation is, by all accounts, on the table.
The Luxon-Willis subplot continues
For now, the political subplot rumbles on. Luxon was photographed last weekend at a school fete spreading Marmite on a slice of fundraiser bread with what looked like genuine enthusiasm. Willis was photographed at her local supermarket holding a jar of Vegemite at her local supermarket and smiling in a way that absolutely was not staged.
This is, on one level, two senior politicians having fun with a national obsession. On another level, it is the cleanest test we have ever had of whether spread preference predicts voting intention, and an enterprising pollster is bound to ask the question soon.
I will, naturally, be reporting back.
