Secret ingredients in your food can make you sick. A proposed California law would reveal them

When food companies keep secrets, consumers pay the price.

In 2022, a foodborne illness caused by Daily Harvest’s French Lentil & Leek Crumbles sickened nearly 400 people, including dozens of Californians, and sent 133 people to the hospital, some needing their gallbladders removed. The outbreak was later linked to tara flour, an ingredient not known to have been used in food before.

Who decided tara flour was safe to eat?

That same year, a college student from New Jersey died after drinking Panera’s highly caffeinated “Charged Lemonade.”

Who determined that amount of caffeine in Charged Lemonade posed no risk?

The answer to both questions is the same: the food industry.

American consumers reasonably assume that before an ingredient ends up in our food or beverages, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has checked it for safety. But in most instances in recent decades, they would be wrong. 

A loophole in federal law allows food companies to market new food additives by self-certifying their safety in complete secrecy. Companies pay their own experts or employees to assess whether a substance is “generally recognized as safe” for use in food. 

With that determination in hand, manufacturers can either share it with the FDA or simply start using that chemical in food without notifying the FDA or the public. 

If you were a profit-seeking company, which would you do?

Unsurprisingly, both Daily Harvest and Panera appear to have made safety decisions behind closed doors, not notifying the FDA of plans to use tara flour and caffeine in their respective products. You might assume that food companies would have to disclose all ingredients on the ingredient labels found on packaged foods and beverages. But you’d be wrong. 

Companies can hide large numbers of ingredients behind such vague terms as “artificial flavor.” As a result, only food companies know what is in food and if those ingredients have been proven safe.

Californians deserve to know what’s in their food. They should be able to trust that those ingredients are safe. The state already leads the way in protecting consumers— especially children — from unsafe food chemicals. Now Assemblymember Dawn Addis is working to give Californians more protections and transparency by pulling the curtain back on the food industry via Assembly Bill 2034.

The bill would require companies that use ingredients that have not undergone FDA safety review to notify the state and explain how they determined those ingredients are safe, providing all the underlying safety data. That information would then be posted in a public database for all to see. 

The measure would also require companies to publicly reveal the chemicals they are hiding behind such black-box terms as “natural flavor” and “artificial color.”

The food industry is pulling out all the stops to kill this commonsense bill. They argue that it will raise food prices across the state, because the companies would suddenly incur major new expenses to comply with the law. 

That is not true. Under federal law, even if companies choose to use new ingredients without notifying the FDA, they are still required to prove those chemicals are safe by conducting rigorous safety evaluations. AB 2034 would simply require companies that skipped the FDA process to share that safety evaluation information with the state instead. 

Only companies violating federal law by using chemicals that have not been proven safe would have anything to worry about. If companies are indeed following existing federal law, then they already have that information on hand.

They would need to just send it to the state — a minor cost at best. There’d be no reason to jack up prices. Besides, the human cost of food industry secrecy has proven to be much higher.