The rice industry has been trying for years to prevent products made from riced or crumbled vegetables from being labeled as rice and even from being displayed in the same supermarket aisle as rice products. The industry has scored a few wins.
“We’ve said from the beginning, rice is a grain, not a shape,” says Robbie Trahan, Louisiana rice miller who chairs USA Rice’s Domestic Promotion Committee. If someone wants to eat cauliflower crumbles, that’s fine. But don’t call it rice. It isn’t.”
Michael Klein, USA RiceUSA Rice, formerly the U.S. Rice Federation, asked the Food and Drug Administration in 2016 to establish a Standard of Identity for rice. The agency has not acted, according to Michael Klein, vice president of domestic promotion for USA Rice. The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which governs food labeling, authorizes the FDA to create identity standards for foods.
“FDA told us they were more likely to take action if a request were an immediate health concern,” Klein said. “They haven’t said no. It’s just not a priority at the moment.”
A standard of Identity details which ingredients a product must contain, which ingredients it is allowed to contain, and any applicable requirements for manufacturing. Since 1939, FDA has established more than 250 Standards of Identity, including those for milk, milk chocolate, various breads, peanut butter, and ketchup. The UN World Health Organization’s Codex Alimentarius defines rice as “whole and broken kernels obtained from the species Oryza sativa L.”
The rice industry refers to non-rice producers that use the term “rice” to market their products as “rice pretenders,” and alleges that such products are both misleading and confusing for consumers. Without a Standard of Identity, FDA allows the “commonly used name” of the product on its label. Because there is no standard for rice, the industry has no regulatory avenue to prevent the use of “rice” by its competitors.” Still, the rice industry has other paths to fight its battle.
In October 2023, USA Rice filed a petition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Trademark Trial and Appeal Board to cancel the trademark registration of RightRice, a product line made by the Planting Hope Co., on the grounds that it was misdescriptive and deceptive. In late November, the Appeal Board granted the petition, canceling the company’s trademark registration, which means RightRice products can no longer use the registered trademark symbol.
It’s easy to be “in the know” about what’s happening in Washington, D.C. Sign up for a FREE month of Agri-Pulse news! Simply click here.
Julia Stamberger, CEO and co-founder of Planting Hope, said RightRice is a “fortified rice-based grain,” that consists of 10% rice flour and 90% lentil, chickpea, and pea flour. She said the product offers an alternative to people who have eliminated or decreased their consumption of rice to lower their intake of carbohydrates or who want to eat foods with low glycemic indexes.
Klein, however, argues that just as wheat flour is not bread, rice flour is not rice, and “by calling their product ‘right’ they are implying real rice is ‘wrong.’ The upshot is that consumers are being at best confused, at worst deceived.”
Planting Hope intends to continue to use the word rice to market its RightRice line of products, and it has filed with USPTO for a review of the recent decision. Stamberger said her company was not notified of the challenge until after the decision was announced, and thus was not given time to respond.
“It is unfortunate that [USA Rice] has chosen not to look closely at and understand our product — we are a consumer of rice as a core ingredient in RightRice and should rightly be a member of their trade association,” she said. “This type of tactic is an unfortunate waste of their funding, their members’ funding and membership dollars, and of the time and resources of the groups required to legislate their claims. The only ones winning here are attorneys — certainly not consumers.”
In 2018, USA Rice asked manufacturers of vegetable products to refer to their products as “riced” not “rice.” A riced product can be chopped or put through a plate or screen. Many of the vegetable products that use the term “rice” on their packaging are riced. Birds Eye and Green Giant responded to USA’s Rice request by making the change, Klein said, while about 10 other smaller companies ignored the request. At that time, RightRice, which is not a riced product, was produced by Betterer Foods, a company that Planting Hope bought in 2022.
USA Rice also asked retailers to move “rice pretenders” out of the rice aisle and into the produce or legume aisles. However, retailers, who Klein said generally accept slotting fees to display products prominently, did not agree to the request.
Klein argues that RightRice and other non-rice products that use “rice” on their labels take shelf space away from rice, and people might be confused if the products are displayed together. “We don’t want people to buy [a rice pretender] by mistake,” Klein said, adding that the USPTO decision could make retailers think twice about what they are selling and where they sell it within their store.
Stamberger sees it differently. The name RightRice indicates to c
Julia Stamberger, Planting Hopeonsumers both how to use RightRice — as an easy swap for white or brown rice — and that it is a form of rice. "The name helps to assist consumers and ease confusion,” she said. “It’s just like plant-based milk or meat. They're called ‘milk’ or ‘meat’ to indicate to consumers how to use the products and where they fit into their diet as alternative choices that offer different base materials and nutrients but perform similar culinary functions.”
If rice’s battle is anything like a long-running dairy struggle, it could be protracted. For decades, FDA has declined to restrict plant-based milk alternatives from being labeled as milk even though milk has a Standard of Identity that defines it as “the lacteal secretion … obtained by the complete milking of one or more healthy cows.” Without an FDA ruling, many companies that make plant-based dairy alternatives have continued to use dairy terms on their products.
Last year, following years of pressure from the dairy industry, FDA proposed that plant-based alternatives that continue to label their product as milk should carry labels that detail the nutritional differences between the offending product and cow’s milk. The proposal outraged both dairy and non-dairy stakeholders alike.
Rice is one of the world’s most popular grains. U.S. consumption of rice has remained relatively stable between 2018 and 2023 at more than 4.5 million tons annually, or about 27 pounds per person. The U.S. rice industry meets about 80-82% of domestic demand. Last year, Arkansas had the most acres planted in rice (1.4 million), followed by California with 500,000, Louisiana at 461,000, Missouri with 200,000, Texas at 145,402, and Mississippi with 119,000.
Arkansas passed a resolution in 2018 and Louisiana enacted a law in 2020 to establish a standard of identity for rice and prohibit sale of products not made from kernels of the Oryza sativa L. plant but labeled “rice” in their states.
A U.S. District Court in Louisiana ruled in 2022 that a state law prohibiting plant-based meat alternatives from using meat descriptive terms like sausage and burger was an unconstitutional restriction of speech, rendering the rice prohibitions moot. More recently, a federal appellate court reinstated the ruling, but narrowed the scope of the law to those companies intentionally trying to deceive consumers.
Today, cultured meat and milk products as well as other food technologies that allow the use of seaweed and algae to produce a molded shrimp alternative have proliferated, Klein said, and that could pressure FDA to do more to eliminate confusion. “FDA will have to address this because consumers are about to become very confused if they aren’t already,” he added.
For more news, go to www.Agri-Pulse.com.
