Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent months criss-crossing the country, cheering on Republican governors who have signed laws aimed at improving their food supply.
Now food and beverage companies including Kraft Heinz Co., Conagra Brands Inc., PepsiCo Inc. and Coca-Cola Co. have formed a group aimed at stopping the proliferation of state laws and setting one nationwide standard instead.
The coalition, called Americans for Ingredient Transparency, launched Tuesday and is pressing for federal legislation setting a “uniform national standard” that would establish standard rules around labeling and which food ingredients are considered safe, according to a website for the group.
“This patchwork of state laws creates confusion for consumers and limits our choices,” the narrator in a 60-second launch video for the group said. “A clear, national ingredient and labeling law fixes that.”
Kennedy has hailed state efforts as victories for his Make America Healthy Again movement by providing faster routes to food regulation than the often time-consuming process of passing new federal standards.
But food activists quickly signaled the new coalition will face some opposition.
“If there’s anything that the food movement is aligned on, it’s making sure that grassroots at the state level continues to perform,” said Vani Hari, known as the Food Babe, an influential voice on food issues within the MAHA community.
Consumer Reports, a consumer-focused nonprofit, said it also opposed the food industry campaign.
“If there were truth-in-labeling laws governing the naming of campaigns, this coalition would be prohibited from disguising their true intention, which is to wipe out all of the state laws that protect consumers from harmful chemical ingredients in food and hold the industry accountable,” Brian Ronholm, its director of food policy, said in a statement.
The Health and Human Services Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The industry campaign marks a new tactic in dealing with Kennedy’s pressure to overhaul their ingredients and provide more transparency. At Kennedy’s urging, many companies have said they will voluntarily remove certain synthetic dyes from many of their products.
But for months, food companies have been signaling the alarm about the patchwork of varying state laws emerging as more governors take up the MAHA agenda.
“We would certainly advocate for consistency across the country,” Coca-Cola Chief Financial Officer John Murphy said in an interview Tuesday. “You can imagine the intricacies of dealing with a variety of different requirements state by state.”
For example, food companies now have until 2027 to eliminate more than 40 ingredients, including artificial dyes and bleached flour, from their products sold in Texas. If they don’t, they’ll have to include a label on new packaging warning the product contains ingredients “not recommended for human consumption” by other countries.
Meanwhile, West Virginia passed separate legislation restricting the use of some food chemicals first in school lunches and later for broader sale in the state. Louisiana passed a bill requiring products containing any of 44 ingredients to have a QR code with additional information.
The food industry coalition brought on as senior advisers Julie Gunlock, a conservative policy advocate, and Andy Koenig, who worked in the White House’s Office of Legislative Affairs during the first Trump administration.
The new coalition, which is structured as a 501(c)4 advocacy group, said it also hopes to work with the Trump administration on several other key food policy issues, including front-of-package nutrition labeling and QR codes. It also indicated it was open to revising a policy at the Food and Drug Administration that Kennedy has criticized that allows ingredients that are “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, to enter the food supply without submitting safety data. Companies can notify the agency of new ingredients they say are safe, but it’s not a requirement.
The coalition said its two core principles are establishing that the FDA is the sole entity to set the bounds of regulations on the marketing and sale of food and beverages, including ingredient approvals and labeling requirements, and that regulations must be based on well-established scientific principles.
People familiar with the coalition’s efforts said it has been hoping to coalesce behind legislation being crafted by Senator Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican, they expect to deal with overhauling the GRAS process and using preemption to set a federal standard.
“It’s next to impossible when here’s your rules in Texas, here’s the rules in Kansas, here’s the rules in California,” Marshall said at a September event. Marshall’s office said he was working on legislation related to the food supply, but declined to comment further.
Photo: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Photographer: Francis Chung/Politico/Bloomberg
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