Washington Report: FDA Sees Menu Labeling as 'Thorny'

The commissioner said the issue has been difficult to parse out as the agency works to write the new law.

March 13, 2013

WASHINGTON - Menu labeling has proven to be quite the "thorny" issue for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Associated Press reports. The agency has delayed final rules as convenience stores, supermarkets and other foodservice retailers have lobbied for exemption. The FDA proposed menu-labeling rules in 2011, but has yet to finalize those regulations.

"There are very, very strong opinions and powerful voices both on the consumer and public health side and on the industry side, and we have worked very hard to sort of figure out what really makes sense and also what is implementable," said Margaret Hamburg, FDA commissioner, during an Associated Press interview.

She labeled this issue as one of the agency??s most demanding, saying that while posting calorie counts in some foodservice locations seemed to work on paper, "in practice it really would be very hard." Hamburg did not elaborate on her statement.

The commissioner did say that the agency was getting close to issuing the final rules, with a tentative release date of this spring. But the food industry and watchdog groups are wrangling with the FDA over the wording.

The proposed rules would make chain restaurants, bakeries, supermarkets, convenience stores, and coffeehouse chains with 20 or more locations to show the calorie count for each menu item. "In a small store like a convenience store that is really putting a lot of [calorie count] signage all over the place," said Jeff Lenard with NACS. "You just hit a point where words become noise and that's not good."

NACS has advocated that, on the federal level, any menu-labeling regulations must account for differences between the convenience store business model and a chain restaurant business model. The NACS position is that an entity should be covered only if revenues from restaurant-type food sales exceed 50% of the store??s overall sales. In evaluating this ratio, pre-packaged food should be excluded from the "restaurant-type food" revenues and fuel sales should be included in the store??s overall sales.

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