Trump’s Food and Drug Administration delayed the rule just four days before it was supposed to go into effect this month.
President Donald Trump’s push to reduce the government burden on business is instead causing chaos in the food industry after he suddenly yanked a rule requiring calories to be posted on menus nationwide.
Trump’s Food and Drug Administration delayed the rule just four days before it was supposed to go into effect this month, jolting food purveyors from steakhouses to convenience stores who’d already been trying to comply. And even though the FDA touted the delay as a way to reduce costs and increase flexibility for businesses, the change did not come early enough to save these companies any money. Many had already spent millions of dollars printing and shipping new menus to thousands of locations across the country so they would be ready for the original May 5 deadline.
“We were very shocked and discouraged,” said Sara Burnett, director of food policy and wellness at Panera, which has been voluntarily posting calories on its menus since 2010.
“We’ve had plenty of time for organizations to figure out how to do this either on your own, or strictly in compliance with the federal legislation,” said Burnett, noting that FDA and the industry have been working on menu labeling for seven years. “We’ve all had plenty of time to prepare.”
Now what’s left is a hodgepodge of inconsistent menu labeling that’s confusing for consumers as each chain had to make a last-minute decision about whether to go ahead with their plans to post calories. Case in point: The $45 billion pizza industry. At California Pizza Kitchen, a sit-down restaurant, calories are now listed for each slice of pie, right next to the price. Over at Domino’s, if you order online, as most people do, you won’t see any calorie counts until you get to checkout. At Pizza Hut? They label calories in at least some of their stores, but those numbers don’t show up when you order online.
The delay also re-opens the rifts between different parts of the food industry over how stringent the rules should be. The restaurant industry itself — the second-largest employer in the country — actually lobbied alongside consumer advocates for the federal labeling mandate as a way to fix to the messy and expensive patchwork of state and local laws that had cropped up at the behest of health advocates across the country. Meanwhile, the grocery, convenience store and pizza lobbies have been pushing back, seeking less-strict requirements.
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Chaos in the food industry caused after Trump yanked a rule requiring calories to be posted on menus nationwide https://t.co/BNVaq3TToT pic.twitter.com/IlgGYkjLiT
— POLITICO (@politico) May 28, 2017
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