FDA Delays Obamacare Menu Labeling Mandate

The Food and Drug Administration announced earlier this month that chain restaurants have an extra year to comply with the Affordable Health Care Act mandate requiring calorie count information to be listed on menus and menu boards.

This national standard applies to chain restaurants with 20 or more outlets.

“Obesity is a national epidemic that affects millions of Americans,” FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg told reporters last year. “Strikingly, Americans eat and drink about a third of their calories away from home.”

Congress sent a letter to the FDA in May asking for a year-long implementation delay for the regulations. Businesses now have until December 2016 to follow the protocol.

“It’s certainly going to be more complicated than they probably expected,” said Daren Bakst, a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation. “They’re trying to regulate businesses that were never intended to be regulated.”

Businesses that will be regulated include grocery stores with covered food, large vending machine operators, movie theaters and amusement parks.

“The FDA interpreted the language much broader than what was intended,” Bakst said. He explained that the FDA is trying to say a convenience store or grocery store is a similar retail food establishment to a restaurant—which is a “silly” interpretation.

Bakst said the interpretation may cause some problems, especially for grocery and convenience stores, where food is not necessarily standardized.

Criminal penalties will be in place for food that does not meet the posted calorie count. The FDA proposed the regulations in 2011 but has spent years hashing out all the details.

Details include fast-food restaurants listing calories for combination meals in a range format.

Pizza joints have noted concerns on how to calculate the exact amount of calories in pizza since they are customized; the FDA allowed these pizza places to list estimated calorie figures.

Regulations require the restaurants to provide other nutritional information by request.

“They went way overboard,” Bakst said, noting that the provision needs to be repealed. “They created a problem for themselves and they created a problem for businesses that really had no business being regulated in the first place.”