Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed sweeping legislation Sunday to slap warning labels on potentially tens of thousands of food and beverage packages – a move that could have ripple effects across the country.
The first-of-its-kind bill requires labels on foods containing 44 dyes or additives commonly found in the country’s food supply, such as in baked goods, candy and drinks. The new mandate will set off a scramble within the food industry, which must decide whether to reformulate its products to avoid warning labels, add the newly mandated language, stop selling certain products in Texas or file lawsuits against the measure.
“When a state as big as Texas requires a warning, that will have an impact on the entire marketplace. No question,” said Scott Faber, a senior vice president at the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit advocating for stronger food safety policies.
The move comes as Republican-leaning states have been racing to embrace Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda aimed at addressing chronic disease and childhood illness. But the effort from Texas – a deep-red state – is particularly striking, food safety experts said. Policies cracking down on the nation’s food supply have often come from big blue states, such as California, and have led food companies to rapidly alter their products.
The food industry was once accustomed to viewing the Republican Party as an ally, as GOP lawmakers and the first Trump administration decried measures like stricter school lunch standards as overregulation by the nanny state. But across statehouses this year, red states like Texas and West Virginia have taken up the charge.
“I think that is almost entirely a function of the MAHA movement,” said Stuart Pape, a lawyer representing food companies who worked at the Food and Drug Administration in the 1970s.
The bill passed the Texas legislature this year with bipartisan support. Abbott signed the legislation despite strong pushback from the food industry, which argued the warning labels would create a patchwork system that would put Texas-based companies at a disadvantage. The legislation also includes other MAHA priorities such as establishing a nutrition advisory committee for the state, updating nutrition training requirements for Texas medical schools and requiring certain physical activity during the school day.
“This is a national conversation about America’s health outcomes because we are spending more on health care than any other nation in the world,” Texas state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst (R), the bill’s primary sponsor, said in a statement to The Washington Post. She added that she received a call from Kennedy who personally urged passage of the legislation.
The United States currently does not have warning labels on its food products, unlike some other countries. In the final days of the Biden administration, the FDA released a proposal to require new labels on the front of packages to flag when a food or drink contains high, medium or low levels of sodium, saturated fat and added sugars. But some nutrition experts and lawmakers have called for the FDA to opt for stronger warning labels, such as the stop-sign-shaped warnings used in Chile, Peru and Mexico.
The Texas legislation takes a different tack than the warnings used abroad and the FDA’s proposal. The bill focuses on more than 40 artificial colors and additives, such as bleached flour, red dye 40 and yellow 5. It requires companies to add high-contrast labels in a “prominent and reasonably visible” spot stating “WARNING: This product contains an ingredient that is not recommended for human consumption by the appropriate authority in Australia, Canada, the European Union, or the United Kingdom.”
The food industry lobbied against the provision, claiming the labels would be misleading.
“The ingredients used in the U.S. food supply are safe and have been rigorously studied following an objective science- and risk-based evaluation process,” the Consumer Brands Association, a food industry trade group, wrote in a June letter to Abbott urging the Republican governor veto the bill. “The labeling requirements of SB 25 mandate inaccurate warning language, create legal risks for brands and drive consumer confusion and higher costs.”
The federal government could preempt the new law in several instances, such as if the FDA determines an ingredient or class of ingredients is safe for human consumption, food safety advocates noted.
The law applies to a food product label “developed or copyrighted” on or after Jan. 1, 2027. This essentially means that companies would only need to add the labels to their packaging when they redesign or update labels, such as when new ingredients are added to a product, according to the office of state Rep. Lacey Hull (R), a primary sponsor of the bill in the House.
The major question is how companies will react to the new mandate for warning labels – and whether they decide to sue over the changes.
Food companies will likely be looking to reformulate the ingredients in their products to avoid slapping a warning on their packaging, according to Pape. They’ll also be considering whether they can have products intended just for sale in Texas.
“As somebody who worked for the food industry, no company is going to carry a warning label,” said Faber, who previously worked for a food trade group but now advocates for safe ingredients.
But the industry contends such a change would be complicated.
“Because there are so many ingredients and we anticipate this impacting so many different products, I don’t know to the extent that reformulation is that feasible at the outset,” said John Hewitt, CBA’s senior vice president of state affairs. Companies may initially not stock certain products on store shelves instead, he added, in part because manufacturers don’t currently have the capability to make state specific labels.
Yet recent state laws over chemicals in the nation’s food have led to nationwide changes. In 2023, California passed a law prohibiting food containing red dye No. 3 from being sold in the state after Jan. 1, 2027. This year, West Virginia’s Republican governor signed sweeping legislation banning foods containing any of seven dyes from being served in school nutrition programs starting in August, and from being sold in the state starting in 2028.
Already, major companies such as Kraft Heinz and Tyson Foods have announced their intent to remove artificial colors from their products.
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