FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

My understanding is this allergen over-labeling was inspired by the FDA in the first place. https://www.fastcompany.com/90830854/sesame-seed-allergen-fd...

From the linked article (from Jan 2023):

  But sesame does differ in one distinct way from eggs, peanuts, shellfish, milk, and soy: The seeds are teeny tiny and hard to keep track of. This means they’re prone to “cross-contamination,” in food-allergy terms. If you operate a bakery that makes sesame bagels, the odds are decent that rogue seeds will end up in your other products, too. Bad news for people with severe sesame allergies. But it’s also expensive and frustrating for food manufacturers to ensure the seeds are kept away from other foods, if they’re on the FDA’s major allergens list.
  
  Advocates have therefore been warning since December that the FASTER Act is poised to have a counter effect. Rather than minimize cross-contamination, as they argue the law requires, many big food brands have opted to add sesame to their bread products, then simply declare it as an ingredient. They are intentionally adding sesame flour to “avoid complying with the spirit and intent of the FASTER Act,” FARE tells Fast Company. That is cheaper than certifying that their facilities are 100% sesame-free.

FWIW Bimbo (a Mexican company) is the largest baking company in north america -- when you go to the typical grocery store almost all the baked goods will be from Bimbo regardless of the label (https://bimbobakeriesusa.com/our-brands)

This seems like splitting hairs on the part of the FDA.

FDA officials acknowledged Tuesday that statements that a product “may contain” certain allergens “could be considered truthful and not misleading.” Bimbo officials have until July 8 to identify steps taken to remedy the issue — or to explain why the labeling doesn't violate FDA standards.

So a baker.. who adds (insert allergy ingredient here), in minute quantity so they can legally say it contains it, is still in the wrong because that product does not normally contain said ingredient?

What is a baker to do? I think it is wholly unreasonable to say a baker cannot say on the product that the product may contain traces of an ingredient, when they cannot 100% say it does not. This just seems like splitting hairs and unnecessarily penalizing the baker.

We should want a food maker to list all possible allergens that could be present, not just are present in the foods.

At this point it seems like it might be more effective to mandate the opposite: labels that indicate that the product is allergen free for X class of allergen.

That way the default (no label) = might contain allergens, and the presence of the label guarantees your safety.

Companies that take allergen cross contamination seriously can tout the label (and win the business of the allergic), companies that don't won't resort to purposefully including allergens in their product to avoid having to overhaul their cross contamination practices.

I used to work in a cookie factory, we often made products for private brands and in some recipes we purposefully added eggs so that it would appear as an ingredient and not "may contain traces of".

As far as I can tell, this is what happens any time a new restriction is introduced without specifying who must bear the financial burden.

Checking for allergens has a cost! Who is supposed to pay?

If you want the general public to pay for it, then mandate that every bakery certifies the amount of allergen in their bread: all the bread will cost more and the allergic people will be able to choose safely.

Otherwise, what else would you expect? Bakeries run their calculations and saw that certified sesame-free bread would cost too much for their customer base to keep buying from them, and opening a separate production line is not warranted by the predicted demand. What else could they do to stay in business?

When Bimbo first changed Orowheat ingredients in their oat wheat bread (pre-pandemic) they didn't announce it.

I searched the web to figure out what happened since even the weight of the bread was noticeably off (tried weighing it on a scale). The new on-line label of ingredients, nutrition, and weight were ~10% off (over an oz), but they were still using the old labeled bags and upc/barcode.

I returned some to the grocery and let them know that all the ones on the shelf were also not the labeled weight. They were very annoyed.

Adding allergens at a low level to everything may have a positive effect of reducing allergies in the population, a sort of automatic oral immunotherapy. I wonder if the FDA intended this effect, and if it'll lead to more controversy like with water fluoridation.

Recently saw something labelled as being made in a facility with ‘all allergens’. Which raises questions; in particular what are they doing with those cats?

(I assume they meant all of the EU’s list of Interesting Allergens.)

Product idea: Allergen slurry. A tasteless/colorless paste containing all known allergens. Put a tiny drop in every batch of product (or at least claim to) and you can slap on an omni-label dissuading anyone and everyone who has even seen an allergist.

Now it's been shown that gradual exposure to nuts can prevent allergies, maybe we should consider it a part of children's early stage health treatments https://news.unchealthcare.org/2023/02/novel-peanut-allergy-...

It was a good idea to start. List ingredients and warn of allergens! Very helpful.

But a stray sesame seed gets into something and somebody gets a reaction and they sue. Essentially it went from "list allergens" to "If you don't list something, that's a hard promise it won't be in there"

See the difference? You can be diligent about keeping allergens out, but bakeries are big places with lots of equipment being used for lots of things. They can be diligent and still occasionally something gets in there - a tiny seed, stuck by static electricity to a paddle etc.

I suggest, to return some sanity to all this, that food preparers have a standard for diligence. If they meet it, then the occasional sesame seed is deemed a reasonable risk and to be understood. That civil cases can't be held limitlessly responsible for everybody's health.

It's may favorite example of unintended consequences.

FDA orders bakers to list allergens. There are stiff penalties if you are allergenic but don't list the allergen.

So? Bakers claim their product contains allergens, even if they don't.

FDA doesn't like it.

So? Bakers add allergens on purpose, so they can rightly claim it contains them.

I think this is a sham and the FDA is overstepping. 0.2% of the population have sesame allergies. Maybe its higher the recent numbers I saw from a government study gave this number.

Having allergies in the USA is already hell thanks to the media, so many people will think you're full of it but no really i'll be bed ridden for a day with nausea and a migraine, which means i just never go out to eat now due to the awkwardness of explaining it all.

From the FDA letter, it looks like they want Bimbo to move the allergens from ingredients to a possible cross-contamination statement. Seems pretty straightforward.

We also offer the following comments:

Separate from the food allergen labeling requirements of the Act, firms may voluntarily place other information or statements on the labels of food products to disclose information about allergens to consumers. For example, firms may choose to voluntarily place allergen advisory statements on products to alert consumers to the possible presence of major food allergens due to cross-contact. Any allergen advisory statement must be truthful and not misleading.

https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-c...

On the other hand, Bimbo is misspelling Khorasan!

The ingredient list declares “Kamut®” which is not part of the common or usual name of Khorasan wheat because it is a brand name. Furthermore, Khorasan is misspelled as “Khorsan.”

So I don't get it why the bakeries didn't go for the "may contain" wording to start with. I guess one was the first to use "does contain" and then purposefully added sesame, everyone else thought that was particularly "clever" and copied it?

The label for Wonder Bread indicates it doesn't have sesame seeds. If you stick to good old American white bread, no problem. It's the bakeries that produce that artisanal multi-grain hippie bread that have sesame all over the place.

Doing the right thing would be a lot cheaper in the long run because a lot of people have mental problems from diet issues.

Subsidies for common allergens that become cheap filler is another part of the epidemic.

Maybe I am missing something but surely "over-labelling" when there is a significant risk of cross-contamination is, in fact, the most sensible approach?

You can just label it as "might contain traces of X due to cross contamination". At least that's how they do it in Europe.

I wonder if claiming non-existent ingredients could be an actual health risk as well. For example, if someone had unrelated but similar symptoms after eating the product. I wouldn't be surprised if certain medications cause harm if taken by someone who is not actually having the allergic reaction they are intended to treat.

Cynical me thinks it sounds like an attempt by Big Food to future-proof themselves against ingredients that may later be found to be an allergen. Have they considered that the plastic packaging they use might be shedding microplastics etc into the product. Er, loaf ?

I guess bakeries will now actually add a tiny bit of sesame to everything, seems easiest.

FDA is talking out of both sides of their mouth. From their own website:

> Consumers may also see advisory statements such as “may contain [allergen] or “produced in a facility that also uses [allergen].” Such statements are not required by law and can be used to address unavoidable “cross-contact,” only if manufacturers have incorporated good manufacturing processes in their facility and have taken every precaution to avoid cross-contact that can occur when multiple foods with different allergen profiles are produced in the same facility using shared equipment or on the same production line, as the result of ineffective cleaning, or from the generation of dust or aerosols containing an allergen.

https://www.fda.gov/food/food-labeling-nutrition/food-allerg...

If guaranteed-sesame-free bread (or whatever) isn't a commercially viable product, then there's nothing that the FDA can do to change that.

If you operate a punitive regulatory regime with respect to cross-contamination, you can't expect manufacturers to say "OK, we'll take the occasional fine and public-relations hit just to address this tiny part of the market" if that's not good business.

If you buy cotton cleaning patches for cleaning rifles, they come with Prop 65 warnings these days. Not because cotton causes cancer, but because cleaning your rifle can expose you to lead, and because plaintiff's attorneys can sue in private enforcement actions. So does the rifle, the solvent and the brass cleaning rod.

As a father of a 9 mo old with a sesame allergy found out the hard way with a trip to the ER... not only are we making our own bread now because of this, but also, so should you! Store bread has so much unnecessary crap in it, idk why we didn't do this sooner. It's a bummer that we basically can't eat anyone's baked goods outside of the house now, but hey, I guess the market decided I should keep my money and invest in my family, while the rest of you should enjoy the completely unnecessary calories, exposure, and expense of sesame flour.

Also, as far as I can tell, most involved in this sucks, FDA for demanding regulation without investment, lobbyists for supplying a crap solution, and manufactures for not rising above it and rarely caring about the quality of their products.

My recommendation is to boycott store bakery isles in general, invest in $BVILF, and use your kitchen to make friends with your neighbors and get everyone you know making bread/baked goods at home. It absolutely takes privilege to follow this journey, but pay it forward with the bread you can make at home with simple ingredients.

The sesame labeling law was lobbied by Food Allergy Research & Education (FARE) [0] who are funded by the National Peanut Board, the National Dairy Council, and a number of Soy product manufacturers [1].

Essentially, the sesame law made it mandatory to label for sesame like you would for Dairy, Peanuts, and Soy.

It was a blatant lobbyist attempt by non-Sesame producers that backfired.

[0] - https://www.foodallergy.org/resources/how-fare-advocates-hel...

[1] - https://www.foodallergy.org/corporate-partners

Interesting name for a bakery

This seems overkill. We should want to encourage food manufacturers to list all possible contaminants.

"100% whole wheat"

2g added sugar per 60 calories.

Wat

FDA would have a better reputation if their drug approval was more pro-consumer.

I mean this sounds like companies are just going to have to start adding allergens to be safe.

Doesn't this incentivise them to deliberately add allergens, so they can keep them on the label

[1] "The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that the prevalence of food allergies has increased by 50 percent since the 1990s, making it a serious public health concern."

The labeling and laws around them seem to be tricky business, however, it should be time to treat the disease and not just the symptoms. The above quote from the CDC tells me that medical advice to new parents and/or diet has created a monster, and it's time to undo the harm. I have 5 children from age 5 to 27 from two different women, and not one has food allergies. I realize it is anecdotal data, but I also don't recall there being so many people with various allergies growing up, and parents I have spoken to that seem to have done the same with doctors and dietary choices for their children don't have children with allergies. So, does this mean in my youth, either kids with allergies died, didn't have allergies, or avoided whatever allergens were out there and were such a small percentage it didn't register? Personally, we didn't give our children antibiotics every time they had cold-like symptoms, or go to the doctor often, and we introduced solids at a very early age along with nuts (in paste form - peanut butter, tahini when they were very young), and a diverse diet. There were families around us that had one of their kids on antibiotics once or more a year for years, and they wouldn't question it, and they were early on the gluten thing before it became a thing.

I think it would be horrific to have a life-threatening allergy to even being exposed to the trace amount of anything. On the other side, I am so tired of not being able to find "normal" food without warnings, and the trend-of-the-day nutrients overcrowding the shelves and displacing other choices. It seems in the US at least, if you say something is good for you, it winds up everywhere in massive quantities. Remember the initial Quinoa boom? Quinoa cereals, buns, drinks, tablets, in pasta, salads, etc. I know it's a grain like wheat is omnipresent, but one day the supermarket shelves get loaded with it until the next health trend comes along - Acai this, Acai that, Avocado this, that, Olive oil, Matcha, Gingko, Ginseng (80s!), Almonds (to the point of overcultivation), etc... Nothing in moderation or common sense, but marketing overload, and the public literally eats it up. I can't even find full-fat yogurt that easy now. My local ShopRite has almost 95% low-fat, no-fat, yogurts on the shelves with 5% or full-fat yogurt, and supposedly fat is good again, it's sugar that's the main culprit for obesity and diabetes and other related diseases in the US.

PS: Imagine trying to run a business in a litigious society where now 50% more people have food allergies to so many things that you need a mass spectrometer or other instrument to make bread to ensure it has what seems to be an undefined trace of one of many related food elements. Life has gotten ridiculous.

[1] https://irp.nih.gov/blog/post/2023/05/digging-up-the-roots-o...

Nothing that bakery makes can reasonably be labelled food.

FDA needs to stop pursuing useless things like this and bab the use of glyphosate as a dessicant. There's plenty of other safety concerns in the American food system. This ain't it