–by Gabriella Agostinelli
Under the 2010 Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) became responsible for issuing new rules regarding nutrition labeling in retail food establishments and vending machines.
Section 4205 of the ACA requires “restaurants or similar retail food establishments” with twenty or more locations to provide clear labeling of the calorie counts of their standard menu items. A business qualifies as a “restaurant or similar retail food establishment” when it sells restaurant-type food and its primary business activity is the sale of food to consumers. All affected businesses are required to display a statement of daily recommended calorie consumption as well as written nutrition information when requested – listing the calories, fat, cholesterol, sodium, carbohydrates, sugars, fiber, and protein amounts.
Section 4205 also calls for similar requirements to be enacted for vending machines when the owner operates 20 or more machines.
No longer compliant
While the ACA mandated the FDA to issue labeling implementation rules by March 2011, no such final rule has been created. FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg recently stated that writing a new menu labeling law “has gotten extremely thorny” due in large part to strong lobbying by supermarkets, convenience stores and other retailers that sell prepared food. In theory, new labeling requirements could affect thousands of items in each supermarket – including prepared foods, cut fruit, bakery items and other store items that aren’t already packaged and labeled. If that were the case, each store would likely be required to send each of those items out to be lab-tested, do paperwork to justify the ingredient and nutritional information for each item to the FDA, and then create new labels and train employees to use them.
In sum, compliance costs are coming for restaurant groups and vending machine owners, but we don’t know when. Stay tuned.
