Dr Courtney Stewart

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Dr Courtney Stewart | Food Label & Claims Expert (RNutr, PhD)
Helping Australian food businesses launch & scale with compliant labels & health claims (no $$ reprints, launch delays!)
👇🏼 FREE Food label checklist

08/09/2026

The backlash against ultra-processed food is quietly redrawing the winners and losers of the entire industry - and your brand is probably on one side of it already.

Half of consumers now say they avoid UPFs. But when buying habits shift that fast, the money moves too - and the brands losing out aren’t always the ones you’d assume. At least one category that looks healthy is getting hit hardest of all.

I break down who’s winning, who’s losing, and the single factor quietly driving the whole shift - the thing on your pack that more than 60% of consumers are now actively reading 👆

Because in a market this sceptical, the brands that win aren’t the ones shouting “healthy” the loudest - they’re the ones with nothing to hide on the back of the pack.

đź’¬ Comment or DM MISTAKES for my free checklist - so your ingredients list and claims are pulling customers in, not quietly raising red flags.

The newest member of our family, Conrad Alexander Stewart 🤍
08/09/2026

The newest member of our family, Conrad Alexander Stewart 🤍

Protein is taking over the dairy and snacking aisle, and this week I found five products all chasing the same consumer.P...
07/09/2026

Protein is taking over the dairy and snacking aisle, and this week I found five products all chasing the same consumer.

Primo, Bega, and Philadelphia have all released protein-forward versions of their most popular products. The format is familiar. The occasion is the same. The claim is different. And that's exactly the strategy: take a product people already trust and buy, make it functionally better, and put "protein" front and centre.

It's smart. And for the most part, it's working.

A few things caught my attention. The "40% more protein" claim on Bega's slices and the "35% less fat" on Philadelphia are both comparative claims which, under the Food Standards Code, require a clearly identified reference product. The asterisks are there, which is the right approach. And Bega's "high in natural protein" framing is worth noting: "high in protein" is a legitimate nutrition content claim, but "natural" alongside it creates an impression worth being careful about, given it has no legal definition under Australian food law.

From a nutrition standpoint, protein content ranges from 5g per serve (Philadelphia) to 12g (Primo), modest to reasonable, but all improvements on their standard counterparts.

The protein trend isn't going anywhere. The brands winning in this space are the ones making sure the claims on their pack are as solid as the product inside it.

Are you seeing protein claims take over your category too? Drop a comment below.

Most food brands treat a health claim like a finish line. Get the evidence. Submit the notification. Print the packaging...
04/09/2026

Most food brands treat a health claim like a finish line. Get the evidence. Submit the notification. Print the packaging. Done.

But the science keeps moving. New studies get published. New relationships get established. And the brands that go back to check? They find claim opportunities their competitors haven't touched yet.

This client had a compliant claim on pack and assumed the job was done. What they didn't know was that the evidence had kept building, and several new claim opportunities had been sitting in the published literature, waiting to be found.

Swipe to see how it unfolded.

Comment MISTAKE below and I'll send you the Food Label Compliance Checklist straight to your DMs.

Most food founders treat compliance like a to-do list item that lives permanently at the bottom of the page. Something t...
02/09/2026

Most food founders treat compliance like a to-do list item that lives permanently at the bottom of the page. Something to sort out once the branding is done, once the product is finalised, once the launch is a bit closer.

And then a retailer asks for the label. Or a buyer's compliance team picks up the pack. Or someone reads the ingredient list a little too carefully.

That's when "I'll get to it later" becomes a very expensive problem.

Here's the reality. Retailers, especially the major ones, have compliance requirements that have to be met before your product can be ranged. Not after. Not eventually. Before. A non-compliant label, an unsubstantiated claim, or an incorrectly formatted allergen declaration doesn't get a second chance in a range review. It just gets a no.

Compliance isn't something you add to a product that's already finished. It's something you build in from the start, so that when the door opens, you're actually ready to walk through it.

So. What are you going to do about it?

Comment MISTAKE below, and I'll send you the Food Label Compliance Checklist straight to your DMs, free, and exactly where to start.

Most food brands spend a lot of time thinking about what their label says. Far fewer think about what it implies.Tasti P...
01/09/2026

Most food brands spend a lot of time thinking about what their label says. Far fewer think about what it implies.

Tasti Products never wrote "high in fruit" on their Weight Watchers bars. They didn't have to. The imagery did it for them, and the ACCC held them to the impression that imagery created, not the words that were or weren't there.

That's the standard. Not what you technically said. What a consumer walks away believing.

Swipe to see exactly what happened, and take a look at your own packaging while you do it.

Comment below: does the imagery on your pack match what's actually in your product?

31/08/2026

This dairy-free milkshake is a genuinely beautiful product - and a textbook example of how a great brand can quietly walk itself into a compliance problem.

Clean ingredients, glass bottle, on-trend in every way. But it’s the way the benefits are described that should make any Australian founder pause.

There’s a line most functional food brands don’t even know exists - and the moment your claims cross it, your product stops being governed by food law and falls under a completely different regulator. Same product, wildly different rulebook.

I break down where that line sits, the specific phrases that cross it, and why this is one of the most expensive mistakes a functional brand can make 👆

Because you can have a perfect product and still end up selling something you’re not legally allowed to sell - and it’s almost always the claims that do it.

đź’¬ Comment or DM MISTAKES for my free checklist - so your claims keep your product on the right side of the line between a food and a therapeutic good.

Most food founders assume that meeting FSANZ requirements means formulating like everyone else in their category. It doe...
28/08/2026

Most food founders assume that meeting FSANZ requirements means formulating like everyone else in their category. It doesn't.

This client looked at every supplementary shake on the market and couldn't find a single one they'd put their name on.

So instead of compromising, they asked a different question: what does the Code actually require, and what room does that leave us to build something we actually believe in?

Turns out, more room than they expected.

Swipe to see how we built a fully compliant product entirely around their ingredient standards, and what it proves about the space between regulation and values.

Comment MISTAKE below and I'll send you the Food Label Compliance Checklist straight to your DMs.

Most food brands don't get into trouble because they made something up. They get into trouble because they used a word t...
26/08/2026

Most food brands don't get into trouble because they made something up. They get into trouble because they used a word that meant more to the consumer than it did to them.

"Fresh." When Lactalis put it on two milk products containing substantial amounts of powdered reconstituted ingredients, that one word became a $59,400 problem.

Every word on your label is a legal representation. Every descriptor creates a consumer expectation. If your product can't meet it, you have the same exposure Lactalis had.

Swipe to see what happened. Comment MISTAKE below, and I'll send you the Food Label Compliance Checklist straight to your DMs.

25/08/2026

If your product contains caffeine, the rules just changed - and a lot of brands haven’t caught it yet.

FSANZ has approved a major overhaul of how caffeine is regulated in food. It draws some hard new lines about what you can and can’t put on shelf: for some products it closes a door, and for one specific category, it quietly opens a new one.

I break down what’s changing, who it hits hardest, and the one shift that could actually work in your favour if you’re in the right space 👆

You’ve got a transition window to get this right - but reformulation and relabelling take time, and the brands that leave it late are the ones who’ll feel it.

💬 If you’ve got a caffeine product and need help working through what these changes mean for you, send me a DM - this is exactly the kind of thing I help food businesses navigate.

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