Most of the regulation that resides under the banner of “food safety” is clunky, anti-competitive, and ineffective. There is much to rework and strip away within the behemoth that is the unwieldy world of food safety.
Let’s start with an illustrative example of the current state of food safety regulation.
A food manufacturer wants to produce a breakfast item for sale in grocery stores. If the manufacturer produces a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich, that product is governed under the watchful eye of the FDA.
If the manufacturer chooses to sell that same product as an open-faced sandwich, flipping the top piece of bread to the side, it is now illegal to sell that product under FDA regulation. It now falls under the jurisdiction of the USDA.
If the manufacturer decides instead to sell the product wrapped inside a tortilla instead of between two slices of bread, it again becomes illegal to sell under FDA regulation. That product is regulated by the USDA.
If the manufacturer takes that same breakfast burrito or wrap and removes the bacon from it, it now falls under FDA regulation again.
The end consumer does not benefit from any of this. Food safety is not served by such a byzantine decision tree.
This represents only a tiny fraction of the problems inherent in our current overwhelmingly complex food safety policy infrastructure.
For instance, the Food Safety Modernization Act, passed in 2011, added untold billions of cost to the production of food within the United States, the costs of such production being borne by small food processors. This set of regulations forces companies producing $1MM in annual sales of food products to submit to onerous regulation that generally requires a full-time employee to manage. Given that net margins for food companies average 12%, a growing company that crosses the $1MM in annual sales threshold must subsequently devote nearly its entire profit for the coming years to pay for the US government’s imposed food safety mandates.
The American public would be best served by enjoying a far simpler food safety oversight system, including:
- Centralized oversight of all food manufacturing operations under a single agency
- An increase in the threshold of applicability for FSMA regulations to apply to companies averaging $10MM or more in annual sales over a three year period