What does “Packed in Australia” mean, and how is it different from “Made in Australia”? One is a claim about where a food was finished — where it went through what the law calls its last substantial transformation. The other is a claim about where it was put together and sealed, used when no single country did enough of the work to earn the first claim. Both phrases can carry a percentage after them, and on a shelf the two numbers look like they’re measuring the same thing. They aren’t.
Two pouches from the same Woolworths range make the point without an example built for it. Macro’s Beef, Sweet Potato & Zucchini pouch, 120 g, for 6+ months, carries a kangaroo-in-triangle logo with a bar chart set into it, and “Made in Australia from at least 96% Australian ingredients” across the front.
Macro’s Pear, Apple & Berries pouch is the same size and the same age bracket, and carries no kangaroo at all — just a bar chart in a box. Its front reads “Packed in Australia from at least 86% Australian ingredients,” a lower number on a mark with no logo attached to it. Read the two words in front of each number before you read the number itself. They answer a different question, and the percentage never tells you which one you’re reading.
Where “made” ends and “packed” begins
Both phrases come from one instrument. Peeka can’t tell you from either mark which of these two pouches suits your baby, and the marks were never built to: what follows is only what the words are required to mean. The instrument is the Country of Origin Food Labelling Information Standard 2016, made under the Australian Consumer Law and listed on the register as administered by the Department of the Treasury. Section 8 defines “made” — a food was made in a country if it underwent its last substantial transformation there. Nothing in that definition looks at where the ingredients came from, only where the finishing happened. The Standard also defines a stricter word, “produced,” which does look at the ingredients: every significant one grown or wholly obtained in the country, and all or virtually all of the processing done there too. Neither pouch uses that word. Both use the weaker one, and the weaker one is what the Country of Origin Standard allows.
Why the pack carries a chart at all
Some foods get to skip the chart and give a bare country statement instead. Section 9 names them, and the list is short and closed: seasonings, confectionery, biscuits and snack foods, bottled water, soft drinks and sports drinks, tea and coffee, alcoholic drinks. Baby food isn’t on it. That makes a pouch a “priority food,” and sections 24 and 25 — the shortcut for everything on the list — don’t reach it: the reason it carries the full mark, logo or its absence plus the banded chart plus the percentage, instead of a single sentence saying where it’s from.
Why one pouch gets a kangaroo and the other doesn’t
Pouch A can carry the kangaroo because it was made here: its last substantial transformation happened on Australian soil, which is the section 8 test, and section 19 is what puts the logo on a food that passes it. Pouch B can’t, because some part of its processing happened somewhere the Standard doesn’t credit as “made in Australia,” so it’s packed here instead, under section 22, and a packed-here mark never carries the kangaroo, whatever the percentage next to it says.
The Standard states this about itself, inside its own worked example: fruit grown in Australia, sent to Singapore to become juice, then shipped back and packed here. The label for that juice may read Made in Singapore from 100% Australian ingredients Packaged in Australia, and the Standard’s text says outright that the label would not carry the kangaroo logo, even though every ingredient in it is Australian, because the juice itself was made in Singapore. A pouch doesn’t need one imported ingredient to lose the logo. It only needs the wrong country to have done the last significant step.
The bar chart is a band, and the number is a floor
The chart and the number are governed separately, and only one of them is banded. Section 10 sets out the chart: a fixed ladder of steps — under 10%, then 10-19, 20-29 and up in tens to 80-89, then 90-94, 95-99, and 100% — and the chart printed has to be the one representing the figure in the mark. The figure itself is a whole number, so Pouch A’s 96% and Pouch B’s 86% are the percentages those manufacturers chose to print, each sitting in the band its chart shows. Section 11 sets what that figure measures: the ingoing weight of the Australian ingredients, as a proportion of the ingoing weight of all the ingredients, by weight. Not by cost, and not by how many ingredients came from where.
The number is also a floor, never a measurement. Sections 19 and 22 both use the same phrase for it: the printed percentage “is not more than the proportion by weight of the Australian ingredients of the food.” A manufacturer can round down and print a smaller number than the true one, but the Standard never lets them round up. That’s why both pouches say “from at least” ahead of the number, the law’s own wording for what the figure is allowed to be: a minimum, never an answer.
By weight, 96% of Pouch A’s 120 g pouch is about 115 g; 86% of Pouch B’s 120 g is about 103 g. The two floors sit roughly 12 g apart — a smaller gap than two different logos suggest, once you put a number on it.
Where the water sits in Pouch A’s 96%
Pouch A’s ingredient list, read off the pack, runs Vegetables (53%) (Pumpkin, Sweet Potato, Zucchini, Carrot, Spinach), Water, Beef (10%), Cornflour. Water is the second-named ingredient, ahead of the beef, by weight. Under section 12(3) of the Standard, water added to a food counts as Australian if it was collected here, and it counts toward the 96% at its own weight, the same as the vegetables or the beef. Nothing on the pack, and nothing in the Standard, requires that percentage to be broken out by ingredient — so you can’t tell from the label how much of the 96% is water rather than named produce.
The arithmetic on what is declared: 10% of the 120 g pouch works out to roughly 12 g of beef, about the size of two teaspoons. That figure and the 96% both describe weight in the recipe. Neither says anything about how the pouch tastes, how much sugar it carries, or whether it suits your baby. A high percentage next to “Made in Australia” is a true statement about where the ingredients, water included, came from. It was never a claim about how much of the pouch is meat, vegetable, or anything else with a name on the label.
The tighter promise on the same front panel
Pouch A carries a second line, in the middle of the front panel and well away from the mark: “MADE WITH AUSTRALIAN BEEF.” Grade it against the percentage in the corner. The Standard does have a slot for a sentence like that one, but only inside the mark: section 19(4) lets a mark add a phrase starting with “with” that names an ingredient and its country, and only where that ingredient comes from that country and nowhere else. The instrument’s own model sentence is “Made in Australia from at least 60% Australian ingredients with Australian beef.” Pouch A’s beef line isn’t written that way — it stands on its own, which section 30 permits, since nothing in the Standard prevents additional country-of-origin information being given. So it isn’t the mark’s own constrained phrase, and the Standard isn’t what holds it to account; the general Australian Consumer Law rules against misleading claims are. It’s also the smaller of the two statements by weight: roughly 12 g of a 120 g pouch, set in type as large as a percentage covering the whole thing.
Does either number tell you anything about the food?
Not about the pouch in your hand, at any rate. Section 11(2) lets the printed percentage be an average across a long window of production — “the average determined over a continuous 1, 2 or 3 year period that ends no later than 2 years before the date the labelling is affixed to the package.” Read that clause slowly. The window it describes is pinned to the day the label was printed and set back from it by at least two years, so it closes well before the pouch in your hand was filled. Whatever the 96% and the 86% describe, it is a stretch of the brand’s manufacturing history. Your pouch sits outside it.
And neither figure is a claim about the recipe. It says nothing about how much sugar is in the pouch, how it’s textured, or whether it’s the right food for your baby right now. A pouch can be almost entirely Australian and still be one you’d reach for less often, and a pouch packed here from ingredients grown further away can be an entirely ordinary choice on the same shelf.
The regulator a parent or a brand actually deals with is the ACCC, which administers the Information Standard and answers questions on it, and which states the logo rule in one line: a standard mark can carry the kangaroo “only if the product was grown, produced or made in Australia.” Section 29 of the instrument goes further: printing the logo, or a bar chart, in circumstances the Standard doesn’t permit is prohibited outright, not a styling call a brand gets to make. Which is the reason the difference between these two pouches is worth reading at all: a brand doesn’t choose between the kangaroo and the plain box, the Standard chooses for it. One pouch qualified for the mark the other didn’t, and the two words above the number are the only place on either pack where that is written down.
General information, not medical advice. Chat with your GP or child health nurse.