Consumers benefit from safe food, not from 50 conflicting state regulatory regimes for food ingredients. Yet states are increasingly passing their own food-additive laws, with ingredient-related legislation surging across 38 states in 2025. These measures include bans on artificial dyes and additives, school-food restrictions, warning-label mandates, “ultra-processed food” rules, and seed-oil disclosures. Consumers would be better served by a standardized system that protects safety and choice without driving up food prices.
The current patchwork is not just inefficient; in some cases, it may be counterproductive and legally questionable. Industry groups have sued Texas over its law requiring warnings for products containing 44 listed ingredients, arguing the labels are misleading, costly, and preempted by federal law. That challenge captures the broader problem: state-by-state food regulation can turn national food markets into a compliance maze.
In response, lawmakers in Washington, D.C. are discussing the FDA Review and Evaluation for Safe, Healthy (FRESH) and Affordable Foods Act of 2026. The bill would replace the growing state patchwork with a uniform federal system. It would tighten oversight of ingredients considered Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) and impose new facility fees while preempting certain state ingredient regulations.
The bill’s strongest feature is national uniformity. Food is sold through interstate and international supply chains. If California, Louisiana, Texas, West Virginia, New York, and other states adopt different ingredient rules, manufacturers may have to reformulate products for different markets, redesign labels, manage separate inventories, or withdraw products from smaller states. Those costs do not disappear. They are passed on to consumers through higher prices, fewer options, and less competition.
The FRESH Act addresses this problem by requiring FDA ingredient regulations to supersede state rules on labeling, sale, or marketing in interstate commerce. That is the core anti-patchwork provision. It would reduce the risk that food companies must comply with a multitude of conflicting regulatory regimes simply to sell the same product nationwide.
While an improvement over the status quo, the bill’s weakness is that it does not simply remove bad state regulation. It replaces it with more centralized federal oversight. It accepts the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) critique that food-ingredient oversight needs more transparency and post-market review. It is better understood as an attempt to establish national uniformity while also increasing federal regulation.
That tradeoff matters. Consolidating power at the federal level can invite lobbying, regulatory capture, and political pressure. A centralized system may reduce state-level confusion, but it can also give incumbents new ways to shape the rules in their favor. Food regulation should not depend on which companies have the best lobbyists or which ingredients are politically fashionable. It should depend on evidence, exposure, and actual risk.
One useful feature of the bill is that it would add the term “common food ingredient” to the list of substances excluded from the definition of “food additive.” This would automatically exclude fruits, vegetables, meat, nuts, and other commonly consumed foods from being considered food additives needing HHS approval. Under the bill, a common food ingredient is one consumed as food before 1958, or one added to the list by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The goal is sensible: protect older, commonly consumed ingredients from being swept into burdensome review unless there is a real safety reason to revisit them.
The implementation, however, could be improved even further. Tying the definition to 1958 aligns the bill with the Food Additives Amendment passed in that year, but it ignores decades of progress in food science, as well as market experience. If the goal is to identify ingredients with a proven record of safe use, why freeze the standard nearly 70 years in the past? A better approach would use a rolling benchmark, such as 20 years of documented safe use. That would protect familiar, low-risk ingredients without locking the food market into the standards of the mid 1900’s.
The FRESH Act would also formalize and expand the GRAS process. Currently, a company can determine internally that a substance is GRAS based on scientific evidence and general recognition among qualified experts. It may rely on internal experts, outside consultants, or an expert panel. The company does not have to submit that conclusion to the FDA before marketing the ingredient.
The bill would change that. Unless an ingredient falls within an exemption, companies would need to submit a formal GRAS notification. HHS would then have 90 days to reject the notification. That deadline is important because regulatory delay functions like a tax on market entry. Large firms can absorb delays more easily than smaller competitors. Faster and more predictable timelines reduce uncertainty and make it easier for new entrants to compete.
Still, mandatory notification carries risks. If every nonexempt ingredient must pass through a formal GRAS process, the bill could raise administrative costs and create a federal bottleneck. That would be especially harmful if HHS can slow the process through vague information requests or shifting standards.
The bill tries to reduce that risk by allowing GRAS review by accredited third-party scientific panels as an alternative to direct HHS review. This could be a useful market-oriented reform. FDA has limited resources, and food-ingredient reviews can bottleneck. Independent expert review, bounded by federal standards and backed by FDA authority, can be faster and more efficient than a centralized agency-only model.
But the bill would be improved with clearer guardrails. It directs HHS to create an accreditation program, set standards, require renewals, and publish a list of approved entities. Yet the bill appears to leave major questions to HHS discretion, including panel qualifications and how “reasonable certainty” of safety will be applied. Without clarification, the system could become arbitrary and administration-dependent.
Another positive feature is that grandfathered ingredients or ingredients with existing notifications would not require new notifications for new uses if there is no anticipated substantial increase in dietary exposure and no significant manufacturing or chemical change. This is a useful deregulatory provision. If a company uses the same ingredient in a different product without materially changing exposure or chemistry, forcing a new filing would add cost without clear consumer benefit. Review should focus on meaningful changes, not paperwork for its own sake.
The bill’s post-market review system is also better than a broad premarket permission structure. MAHA advocates, including Secretary Kennedy, often argue that too many ingredients have remained in use without enough scrutiny. But the best response is not to force every ingredient through a front-end federal checkpoint. The better tool is targeted post-market review.
Post-market review creates a systematic way to revisit ingredients after they are already on the market. If credible evidence shows that a product is unsafe, it can lose GRAS status and be removed from sale within two years. That approach is more flexible than precautionary premarket barriers. It allows consumers to access products unless evidence shows a real safety problem, while still giving regulators a way to respond when new evidence emerges.
The bill also imposes food-facility registration fees on manufacturers, processors, packers, and holders of food. Fees are a tax by another name. They raise compliance costs and will ultimately be reflected in prices. If Congress chooses to fund more oversight through fees, those fees should be low, capped, transparent, and protected from becoming an expanding revenue stream.
The FRESH Act correctly identifies the problem: a growing patchwork of state food-ingredient bans and labeling mandates threatens to raise costs, reduce choice, and fragment the national food market. By preempting conflicting state rules and establishing a uniform federal framework, the bill is a meaningful improvement over the status quo. A national standard would reduce compliance uncertainty, make it easier for companies to sell the same products across state lines, and help preserve consumer access to affordable food. The bill also moves in the right direction by recognizing that post-market review can address legitimate safety concerns.
The bill could be improved further by ensuring that national uniformity does not become centralized overregulation. Known foods and ingredients with a substantial history of safe use should remain outside premarket review and repeated GRAS filings unless credible new evidence shows harm. Heightened scrutiny should be reserved for genuinely higher-risk categories, including novel ingredients, materially changed manufacturing processes, ingredients heavily consumed by children, and substances with credible new toxicological concerns. GRAS notification should be transparent, but it should not become permission by another name; FDA should have firm deadlines and be required to object based on specific scientific deficiencies. Third-party review should also be open, competitive, and governed by clear standards rather than broad HHS discretion.
For consumers, the most important factor is cost. State-by-state regulation forces manufacturers to reformulate products, redesign labels, maintain separate inventories, hire compliance teams, or avoid certain markets altogether. Those costs flow directly into grocery prices, increasing them by 12 percent, and reduce the number of products available on store shelves. A uniform national system would lower those compliance costs, preserve economies of scale in food production and distribution, and make it easier for smaller competitors to sell nationally. The FRESH Act is not perfect, but it outlines a path to a single national standard that would help protect consumers from higher prices caused by 50 different food-rule regimes.
Justin Leventhal is a Senior Policy Analyst for the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit education and research organization that advocates for consumers through evidence-based analysis and data. Follow Justin on X @JustinLeventhal.