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A lobby group representing the food industry is resigned to the prospect that a parliamentary inquiry into obesity and Type 2 diabetes will call for controls on food marketing.
But another industry body, the Food and Grocery Council, is fending off regulation with a voluntary classification label attached to most foods.
"Some of the submissions to the inquiry have been very strongly anti-marketing," says Robert Bree, executive director of the Food Industry Group, representing the food media and marketing industries.
"It is easy to expect committee recommendations will be designed to limit marketing freedoms. We know and anticipate this because every similar exercise overseas has gone the same way."
The voluntary classification initiative follows the lead of companies such as Kellogg's, Coca-Cola and McDonald's, which have already developed their own labelling systems. They won't be part of the Food and Grocery Council scheme.
The health select committee inquiry holds its final public hearing today and chairman Sue Kedgley - a Green Party MP and critic of food industry marketing - says the committee has yet to decide which recommendations will go to Health Minister Pete Hodgson.
But businesses in the food and marketing sectors say the end of hearings marks a milestone for the obesity debate and the inquiry has been weighted with the "emotional" views of health activists.
One of the largest submissions to the inquiry was from the Health Ministry-funded Obesity Action Coalition, which advocates controls on marketing.
The coalition executive director, Celia Murphy, says that food and marketing companies had a right to defend profits and should not be expected to police themselves.
This year the coalition and another health activist group, Agencies for Nutrition Action, called for regulation "that prevents the marketing of all high-fat sugar and salt foods across all media types", a proposal that, if enacted, might affect sales of high-fat sugary foods but would damage the television and magazine sectors in particular.
The coalition has said that part of the problem is that there are too many food companies producing too many products that dominate supermarket shelves.
The Food Industry Group was set up in response to growing calls for regulation that could affect some of New Zealand's biggest companies, such as Fonterra, Hansells and Sanitarium.
Bree says the group has to look at the next stage, defending "commercial rights" for food companies to advertise.
"What we need to say is that if they take that route it takes us into a constitutional debate about the right to advertise and then into what foods are regarded as healthy or unhealthy."
The Food and Grocery council represents most food manufacturers in New Zealand and its labels will be virtually universal on big food brands based here.
Most packaged food products now display nutritional information but the new labels specify nutritional content and the amount that can be consumed before meeting nutritional requirements. The plan is similar to labelling developed by the Australian food industry.
Council executive director Brenda Cutress says the labelling allows consumers to decide for themselves what food they have, including "treats."
But the Obesity Action Coalition opposes the scheme.
Murphy and other activists prefer a "traffic light" system of warnings about foods categorised by nutritionists as healthy or unhealthy.
Bree says there are dangers in that approach, which ignores the complexity of the issue.
"Who has the God-given right to decide what food is healthy and which is unhealthy?" he says.
The executive director of the Association of New Zealand Advertisers, Jeremy Irwin, says it is too early to rule out the prospect that marketing and advertising will be untouched.
But the chief executive of Business New Zealand, Phil O'Reilly, agrees with Bree that the debate during the inquiry has sometimes been emotional.
He says there are "real dangers" of regulations that will hurt the food business.
The Government opened the door to regulation in its previous term with its review of liquor advertising, O'Reilly says.
