Rafferty’s Garden Baby Food Pouch Sweet Potato, Carrot & Apple, 4+ Months,
120g is 60% apple. The ingredient panel on the back reads
Apple (60%), Sweet Potato (25%), Carrot (15%), <0.5% Fruit Acid (Citric Acid),
according to
the pouch’s own product page.
The pack is named for the vegetable. Most of what is in it is fruit.
Both numbers are printed on the same 120g pack, in the same font size, in brackets, next to the ingredient each belongs to. Standard 1.2.10 of the Food Standards Code is why the brackets are there at all.
Why apple sits first in the list
Ingredient order on an Australian label is a weigh-in. Food Standards Australia New Zealand’s rule runs to one sentence: “Ingredients must be listed in descending order (by ingoing weight).” Heaviest first, lightest last, with no exception for what sounds better on a shelf. Read the first name in any Australian ingredient list and you have found the thing there is most of. On this pouch that is apple at 60%, ahead of the sweet potato at 25% that opens the product’s own name.
Where the bracketed number comes from
Food law put it there, and the brand had no say in whether it appeared. FSANZ’s guidance states it plainly: “Most packaged foods have to carry labels which show the percentage of the key or characterising ingredients or components in the food.” A characterising ingredient is one named in the food’s title, pictured on the front, or otherwise the thing a shopper would reasonably assume they are buying. The instrument behind the requirement is Standard 1.2.10 of the Food Standards Code — Information requirements — characterising ingredients and components of food. Rafferty’s Garden names three ingredients on the front of this pack, so food law calls all three characterising and all three carry a number.
The front of this pack against its own panel
| On the front | On the panel |
|---|---|
| ”Sweet Potato, Carrot & Apple” | Apple 60%, Sweet Potato 25%, Carrot 15% |
| “Made in Australia with NOTHING ELSE except for Sweet Potato, Carrot & Apple” | Three named ingredients plus <0.5% citric acid, declared as a fruit acid |
| ”No preservatives, no artificial colours or preservatives, no added salt or sugar” | Ingredient list carries no separate sugar or salt additive; sugars come from the fruit and vegetable content itself |
(All figures from the same product page.) Both columns are required by different parts of the same Code, and both are true at once. Percentage labelling is what lets a shopper check one against the other in about four seconds, with no calculator and no email to the manufacturer.
The citric acid gets no percentage of its own, just the catch-all <0.5%.
That follows
the same FSANZ definition:
a characterising ingredient is named in the title or emphasised on the
label, and citric acid is neither. It does a functional job in the recipe
and the label reflects that.
The sugar line answers a different question again. “No added sugar” describes what was left out during manufacturing. The nutrition information panel separately states 8.4g of sugars per 100g, which is 10.1g across the full 120g pouch, sourced from the fruit itself. What 10.1g means for a specific child on a specific day is a conversation for a GP or child health nurse, and no percentage sign can answer it.
The same check on any pack named after an ingredient
The mechanism is generic. Any Australian packaged food named after an ingredient — “strawberry” yoghurt, “chicken” soup, a “sweet potato” pouch — has to state what percentage of the product that named ingredient is, under the same Standard 1.2.10 trigger. The check is two moves. Read the first name in the ingredient list for what there is most of. Then find the percentage attached to whatever is named on the front.
Next supermarket trip, those two moves work on a “chicken” pouch, a “banana” yoghurt or a “pea” snack, on the shelf next to this one. The brackets on those packs are printed for the same reason and say as much as the ones on this Rafferty’s Garden pouch: 60% apple in a product called sweet potato.
General information, not medical advice. Chat with your GP or child health nurse.