For more than 25 years many of us have looked for a little red and white logo when we're deciding which foods to throw into our shopping trolley.

But now the Heart Foundation has put the tick into retirement as the Health Star Rating system, a newer way of rating foods, has taken over.

Both the tick and the Health Star Rating system are food labelling systems that rate the nutritional quality of packaged foods, and are supposed to help consumers make healthier choices when buying processed food.

The Heart Foundation says millions of Australians used the tick to help them make healthy food choices every day, but now that the star system "is becoming sufficiently well established, and understood by shoppers... we feel we can now safely begin to retire the tick," says Mary Barry, the Heart Foundation's national CEO.

The tick will disappear from our shelves over the next few years, but as we start to say farewell we take a look at the areas where it did well and those where it let us down.

Buying a halo

One of the biggest concerns about the tick was that food manufacturers had to pay a fee for it, says Dr Rosemary Stanton.

"I was critical because people had to pay for it, and it was always described as 'we earned the tick', as if you were selected," she says.

"The Heart Foundation didn't just look at the products and say 'this is a good one and give it a tick'. People had to apply and if their product rated well enough, and they paid the money, then they got the tick."

This meant that products that were as good, if not better, than those with the tick were overlooked by consumers looking for products with the Heart Foundation's endorsement.

But Ms Barry says companies were never able to 'buy' the tick. The money they paid the Heart Foundation was to cover the costs of having the food assessed, and of running the tick program.

"People had the perception, and we had to live with the perception, that the tick could be bought. But it couldn't be bought because if you didn't meet the nutrient criteria, you did not qualify for the tick," she says.

What the tick did well

Back in 1989, when the tick was launched, there was no information on packaged foods to help consumers make healthy choices.

Foods that passed the nutritional and ingredient standards set by the Heart Foundation didn't only get to display the tick, these foods were also the first in Australia to display nutrition information panels (the confusing little tables that have been mandatory on all packaged foods since 2001).

"The most important thing that the tick did was that it got people thinking about the healthiness of different types of food and focused attention on food labelling," says Professor Sandra Jones, director of the Centre for Health and Social Research at the Australian Catholic University.

"The tick brought the idea to consumers that there was a potential for an independent body to provide some indication on food packaging that something was good for you or not good for you."

The Heart Foundation also credits the tick with:

helping to reduce unhealthy trans fat levels, especially in yellow spreads (margarines and butter substitutes)

helping to reduce unhealthy trans fat levels, especially in yellow spreads (margarines and butter substitutes) helping improve the quality of many processed foods in Australia. For example, in 2013, approximately 16 tonnes of salt was removed from the food supply from the reformulation of pasta sauce alone.

The tick helped people figure out which was the healthiest food in a particularly category.

"Where the tick worked — and where the star system will work — is if you take a high-salt bread and you compare it to a low-salt bread. Now that's a really good use where you can start to get benefit," says Mark Lawrence, professor in public health at Deakin University.

But that was also part of the problem.

Best of a bad bunch

The tick worked quite well if you were buying a relatively healthy food, says Professor Lawrence. But more often than not when you're dealing with processed food, the best food in a category means you're choosing from the "best of a bad bunch".

This was one of the strongest criticisms that came from dietitians and nutritionists, including Dr Stanton.

"We had a tick on the best of the meat pies, and that was giving a health halo to foods we're basically trying to eat less of. But they got the tick and consumers thought 'well that [means it's] OK'".

The last thing we need is more encouragement to eat junk food. At least 35 per cent of our food intake comes from discretionary foods (aka junk foods) despite dietary guidelines recommending we limit these.

"The biggest concern I have is, whether it's the tick or now the star rating, [is that] it's all focused on junk food, predominantly. It has to be packaged and processed, and so perversely, the foods that are the problem become the focus and become the solution. So we end up giving positive stars to confectionary or Milo," says Professor Lawrence.

"If we cleared that up, where the tick or stars were used on less processed foods, then they would be perfectly compatible with dietary guidelines. In fact they would be a real benefit. You would then be confident that only healthy foods would get those ticks or stars or whatever."

But it wasn't just that the tick gave unhealthy foods a health halo. Some say the Heart Foundation itself experienced an almost reverse halo effect due to the tick's negative publicity.

Professor Jones says a lot of people are far more sceptical about the Heart Foundation because of the concerns that they have about the tick, and how certain foods got the tick.

"There were some very high profile things — like when McDonalds got its tick — that people are saying 'gee you are the Heart Foundation, you're supposed to be looking after and giving us good advice about healthy food and if McDonald's can get a tick, the whole system doesn't work'," Professor Jones says.

"I think it has had that effect where people have said 'we don't really trust the tick and if we don't really trust the tick do we really trust the Heart Foundation, because they are the people giving out the tick'."

McDonald's, seriously?

It's true, that in order to meet the criteria, those McDonalds' items with the tick would have had to contain limited amounts of fat, trans fat, salt and kilojoules, as well as containing other ingredients and nutrients, such as fibre, calcium, wholegrains and vegetables.

While some of the McDonald's foods that scored the tick included salads and fruit, burgers and nuggets were also on the list.

Not surprisingly there was considerable negative publicity. At the time the Heart Foundation argued that McDonald's was a popular food choice and that the items with the tick were healthier choices when compared to others in the same category.

McDonald's eventually lost the tick, but many felt that it showed the flaws in the system.

"A lot of credibility was lost in the system when McDonalds got the tick," Professor Lawrence says.