Lion is confident that drinkers will not be put off by its Australia-first move toput nutritional information on beer labels, but the brewer acknowledges there are risks involved.

Beers including XXXX, Hahn and Tooheys will now clearlystateinformation about theirsugar, preservative, calorie (kilojoule) and carbohydrate contentas part of Lion’s Beer the Beautiful Truthcampaign.

Lion believes that consumers will appreciate having the information rather than baulking at the products, Beer, Spirits & Wine marketing director Matt Tapper told Radio Brews Newsthis morning.

“There’s always risks with these things. We talk at Lion about taking moderate risks. We’ve researched this extensively and everything we see suggests that there’s a lot more upside than downside.”

Tapper said it is instructive that seven out of ten consumers say they want more information about what is in their beers and they’d like to see it on the packaging.

“I think that’s good enough for us,” he said.

Tapper said there are three elements to the campaign, starting with the not insignificant process of changing the packaging.

“Over the next week or two, our brands are going to start leaving our breweries with all of the nutritional information on their packaging… that’s going to happen on bottles, cans, six packs, cartons, bottle tops, all different types of packaging… change outs running into the thousands,” he said.

Once the new products are out in the trade, the initiative will move to the next phase – a significant advertising and promotional campaign.

All of that advertising will encourage people to visit beerthebeautifultruth.com.

“We wanted to get our packaging done first and in market, then we want to start a bigger conversation with the Australian public via advertising, then we wanted to make sure that if they had anything else they wanted to know or they wanted to dig deeper then they could go to a website, which is as extensive or as deep as anyone’s ever gone,” said Tapper.

Look out for the full interview with Matt Tapper on Radio Brews News later this week.