The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently released a joint Request for Information (RFI) to inform the country’s approach to date labeling on food. To help eaters voice their support for standardized labels that can decrease food waste, the Zero Food Waste Coalition (ZFWC) published a new toolkit.
The RFI comes from the USDA’S Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) and the FDA. The agencies are seeking responses by March 5th, 2025 to better understand barriers to standardizing date labeling, research on consumer perceptions of date labels, and the impact date labels can have on food loss and waste and on food donation.
The Coalition’s toolkit helps eaters navigate the comment process. It includes comment templates for individuals, organizations, and industry members. It also contains instructions to submit comments along with sample copy to amplify the RFI through social media and newsletters.
The agencies pose 13 questions and allow commenters to respond to as many as they prefer. ZFWC encourages everyone to provide any data, studies, or other evidence that supports their response.
“Data from ReFED has found that standardizing date labels would have a net financial benefit of US$3.8 billion per year, the large majority of which would be savings to consumers,” Emily Broad Leib, Director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, tells Food Tank. “It is exciting to see USDA and FDA working together to gather information and identify steps for how they can improve the situation.”
WWF reports that food loss and waste contributes to 8-10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Confusion over date labels accounts for around 7 percent of consumer food waste in the United States, according to ReFED.
In 2024, California became the first state in the country to standardize food date labels and ban “sell by” dates to cut food waste, but legislation at the federal level has lagged.
According to ZFWC, the RFI represents a “crucial opportunity to demonstrate wide-spread support for standardizing date labels.”
Broad Leib tells Food Tank that the “seeds of this work were planted during the first Trump administration, which launched the Federal Interagency Collaboration to Reduce Food Loss and Waste, and started USDA and FDA (along with EPA) on a path to coordinate on reducing food waste.”
And while the RFI doesn’t commit to a policy or approach, “we hope the agencies will receive many comments showing how important this issue is to consumers, manufacturers, businesses, and food recovery organizations, and that the agencies will jump on the opportunity to standardize and clarify date labels,” Broad Leib says.
Comments can be submitted electronically on the federal register by clicking HERE. The toolkit also contains instructions for delivering comments by mail.
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Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
