US food and drink manufacturers have called for the July 2018 deadline to implement changes to the Nutrition Facts label to be pushed back three years.
Industry bodies including the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the International Dairy Foods Association and the North American Meat Institute have written to Tom Price, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, to argue they need more time to make the alterations to the label, which were announced last May and include the addition of information on “added sugars”.
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The organisations urged Price to give them until May 2021 to make the changes. Consumer advocates have criticised the move.
In the letter to Price, also signed by bodies including the National Confectioners Association, the American Frozen Food Institute and the Infant Nutrition Council of America, the organisations insisted their “member companies support providing consumers with clear information to help them make healthy choices and we are committed to implementing these rules”.
However, they added: “We believe however, this can be accomplished with far less complexity and cost.”
The organisations pointed to a study by the US Food and Drug Administration on the costs of implementing the new labels and said more time would also allow the US Department of Agriculture to finish its work on new legislation on the disclosure of the presence of genetically-modified ingredients.
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By GlobalData“As demonstrated in FDA’s own regulatory impact analysis for these rules additional time will avoid billions of dollars in wasteful spending on duplicative relabeling schemes, allow coordination with planned label updates, provide the FDA time to issue guidance that is critical for implementing key provisions of the rule and create a timeline that will allow USDA to complete its work on a separate rule mandated by PL 114-216, which requires mandatory disclosure of ingredients produced with biotechnology.”
They added: “The current compliance deadline does not sufficiently account for the time, resources, and complexity involved in label changes of this magnitude. While a two-year compliance timeline may have been sufficient for the original nutrition facts panel rules issued in the 1990s, the food and beverage world is much more complicated today. According to Nielsen data, 400,000 new products have been introduced since the early 1990s, which substantially affects the ability of manufacturers to change labels within the same timeframe allotted more than 20 years ago.
“Additionally, to change essentially every single food package in the US requires testing and analyzing products, entering ingredient information into databases, new label and packaging designs, new printing plates, and queuing up in line with printing companies. The process requires coordination among software vendors, ingredient suppliers, compliance/quality assurance teams, graphic designers, printing companies and others on a scale of magnitude that has never before been executed. This untenable situation is exacerbated by the fact that as of today, with only 16 months left in the
implementation period, FDA has yet to issue final guidance on how to define and properly calculate two common food ingredients: dietary fibre and added sugar.”
At present, manufacturers have until 26 July 2018 to make the necessary changes to the Nutrition Facts label, which then First Lady Michelle Obama said last May would “make a real difference in providing families across the country the information they need to make healthy choices”.
The trade bodies’ letter to Price pointed to the deadline for the USDA to finish its rules on the disclosure of GMOs in food – three days later on 29 July 2018.
“This means that only three days after over 715,000 covered food and beverage products are required to be in compliance with FDA’s NFL rules, industry must again begin the expensive and time-consuming process to redesign labels and related materials and relabel their products to come into compliance with the biotechnology disclosure rule,” they said. “The most cost-effective approach would be to minimise the number of times packaging must be redesigned, reprinted and relabeled.”
Questioned yesterday before the US Senate’s health, education, labour and pensions committee, Donald Trump’s nominee for FDA Commissioner, Dr Scott Gottlieb, indicated he would favour lining up the changes to the Nutrition Facts labels with the USDA’s rules on GMO disclosure.
Campaign group the Center for Science in the Public Interest emphasised the plan to introduce information on added sugars, which it described as “a critical step forward in addressing this country’s obesity epidemic but one that stands to embarrass many makers of sugar-rich processed foods”.
Michael Jacobson, the CSPI’s president, said: “It is mind-boggling that the food industry is fighting transparency and consumer information even though that’s exactly what their customers want. Not only is industry undermining the public’s health – it is undermining its own credibility.”
In response to Jacobson’s comments, a spokesperson for the GMA said: “Manufacturers are in full support of nutrition labeling as a way to transparently communicate important information to consumers and are working diligently to comply with the revised regulations. We believe in the importance of providing accurate, consistent, and timely nutrition labeling information to consumers to help guide their selection of healthy diets. That’s why companies want definitive direction and guidance from FDA in order to implement the revised labeling regulations, with a compliance deadline that ensures our member companies have final guidance upon which to rely and time to make the major label changes.”
