The Food and Drug Administration has yet to propose a long-awaited rule requiring nutrition labels on the front of food packages, leaving it up to the next administration to finalize the regulations even if the plan is released as scheduled this fall.
Since the release of the Biden administration’s 2022 National Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition and Health, FDA has been weighing the possibility of requiring labels on the front of food packages showing saturated fat, added sugars and sodium.
A formal proposal is now expected to be issued in October, according to the Office of Management and Budget’s latest unified agenda.
“We are really hoping for no further delays,” Eva Greenthal, a senior policy scientist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest said, noting that a rule is now expected to come nearly a year later than it was originally expected.
Sugar Association CEO Courtney Gaine said at the American Sugar Alliance’s recent International Sweetener Symposium in Seattle that the election season could complicate the rule's timing. But she noted that “there’s a lot of pressure on FDA to keep this moving forward.”
While a change in administration could affect the agency’s implementation of a new rule, Melissa San Miguel, president of the lobbying firm Red Flag USA, said she would expect a potential Kamala Harris administration to “continue along the same lines" as the Biden administration on front-of-pack labeling.
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Even if Donald Trump were to win the presidency, she noted there were times during his administration when the “FDA commissioner was happy to let some kinds of restrictive food policy measures roll forward.”
“There is on both sides of the aisle — I think — a tendency to want to look at restrictions, particularly when it comes to vulnerable populations and what folks can be allowed to purchase anyway,” San Miguel said.
Over the last two years, the agency has been testing varying labeling schemes to determine their impact. Some employed colors such as red, yellow, and green to indicate saturated fat, sugars and sodium levels, while others replaced the colors with the words “High,” “Medium” or “Low.” Others included daily value percentages, or listed the product as being “high in” one or more of the three categories.
Opinions on the best option are split. Some consumer advocates are pressing the agency for simple indicators, such as color coding, to help consumers more easily navigate labels, rather than having to decipher daily value percentages.
Some food manufacturers and commodity groups are pressing the agency to use black-and-white schemes, arguing that using a color such as red could lead consumers to believe they should not purchase some products deemed high in one of the noted categories, such as sodium or added sugar, despite those products potentially having other nutritional benefits not seen on the front label.
In crafting its proposal, FDA would be pulling from labeling authority granted from the 1990 Nutrition Labeling and Education Act. Commissioner Robert Califf said at a virtual public meeting last November that front- of-package labels could become “similarly iconic” to the labels already required on the back of packages.
“Although we can't use many of the methods of modern advertising, we do have the ability to make basic information available to all consumers,” Califf said at the event. “And putting the fundamental information on the front of the pack is a common sense way to improve the probability that the consumer will have a chance to be informed.”
A number of other countries have implemented front-of-pack measures of their own, including Canada and Mexico.
The delay in issuing the regulations likely stems from FDA’s interest in having an “inclusive process” in crafting the labeling requirements, said CSPI's Greenthal. She said it’s not surprising that it’s taking longer than previously anticipated.
“It’s a big initiative,” she said. “It’ll affect all packaged foods. There’s a lot of different opinions about what the label should look like and FDA needs to make sure that the system they choose is grounded in the best evidence that they consider with stakeholder input from all the different interested parties.”
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