Dive Brief:
- The FDA has pushed back the deadline for restaurants, grocery stores, and other businesses that serve food to begin labeling calorie counts on their menus. The original ruling was a provision of the Affordable Care Act, and the new deadline is Dec. 1, 2016. This gives these companies more time to prepare or could mean it will be delayed long enough to never go into effect.
- The requirement would mainly apply to certain, but not all, processed foods, such as some prepared foods in grocery stores, like sandwiches and salads, but not bulk items, such as bread or a rotisserie chicken.
- Though many industry representatives lobbied against the provision, "The delay may be more about bureaucracy than industry influence. Many who supported the rule said that the agency had yet to issue a crucial guidance document that would help the industry understand how to carry it out, and that with less than six months to go before the original deadline, there was a risk that the rule would create chaos," according to The New York Times.
Dive Insight:
This ruling may have a wide range of effects on food manufacturers. A certain level of transparency about food products' nutrition that would have been on display has now been delayed, and how that might affect consumer perceptions can't be known. Consumers are demanding more transparency from their food companies, which some, such as The Hershey Co., have made moves to abide by. This includes the movement toward clean labeling, which has become a popular new industry norm.
Another effect is the health factor involved in providing this labeling information. To make their products more attractive, restaurants, grocery stores, and other businesses may want to reduce their calorie counts by as much as possible without changing their recipes and flavors too much.
This means the companies who provide the ingredients — food and beverage manufacturers — in turn will need to find ways to make their products healthier so as to not lose those customers to other brands of the same product. This is especially true for processed foods companies, which have been under pressure from consumers to change their ingredients, such as removing artificial colors and flavors, as well as remove PHOs, as now mandated by the FDA.