Consumers have challenged many kinds of food products labeled as “all natural” before but there is a few confusion as to what types of foods can actually be classified as being natural and what the criteria is or should be for these kinds of foods.
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FDA will be accepting comments on the “natural” definition until February 10, 2016.
“If the FDA were to create a more strict, more comprehensive definition, it would give manufacturers a lot more guidance on whether or not they could use the term “natural” on their food products”, said Wasserman.
The agency’s policy when it comes to “natural” is that it means nothing artificial or synthetic – including color additives – is in a food that would not normally be there.
The FDA said it received three Citizen Petitions asking that the agency define the term “natural” for use in food labeling and one Citizen Petition asking that the agency prohibit the term “natural” on food labels.
“From a food science perspective, it is hard to define a food product that is “natural” because the food has probably been processed and is no longer the product of the earth”, a section of the FDA website reads.
And a few federal courts have asked the FDA to determine whether food products that contain genetically modified ingredients or those with high fructose corn syrup can be labeled as “natural“. Another citizen petition from the Consumers Union asked the FDA to limit the use of the term “natural” on food labels. The US Food and Drug Administration announced yesterday that it wants input on how to define the word, which appears on over $40 billion of food products every year. In addition, there have been numerous class action lawsuits challenging the use of the term “natural” in food labeling.
Regarding its previous stance toward natural, FDA explained, “this policy was not meant to address food production methods, such as the use of pesticides, nor did it explicitly address food processing or manufacturing methods, such as thermal technologies, pasteurization, or irradiation”.
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FDA also acknowledges that the USDA Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) definition of “natural claims” considers the degree of processing that the food undergoes and provides examples of “minimal processing” and “severe processes”. And while the FDA has undertaken the task of reading the comments submitted by the public, it has not stated any plans to redefine the term and offer a standardized, legal definition of it so far.
