FDA boss: Menu labeling faces obstacles

Diners will have to wait a little longer to find calorie counts on most restaurant chain menus, in supermarkets and on vending machines.

Writing a new menu labeling law "has gotten extremely thorny," said the head of the Food and Drug Administration.

The 2010 health care law charged the FDA with requiring chain restaurants and other establishments that serve food to put calorie counts on menus and in vending machines. The agency issued a proposed rule in 2011, but the final rules have been delayed as some retailers have lobbied hard to be exempt. While the restaurant industry has signed on, supermarkets and convenience stores say they want no part of it.

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said menu labeling has turned out to be one of the FDA's most challenging issues, and while requiring calorie counts in some establishments might make sense on paper, "in practice it really would be very hard."

The 2011 proposed rules would require chain restaurants with 20 or more locations, along with bakeries, grocery stores, convenience stores and coffee chains, to clearly post the calorie count for each item on their menus.

Representatives for the supermarket industry say it could cost them up to a billion dollars to put the rules in place -- costs that would be passed on to consumers.

Erik Lieberman of the Food Marketing Institute, which represents retail grocery chains, said the rules could cover thousands of items in each store, unlike restaurants, which typically have fewer items. The rules could go beyond just the prepared foods case and extend to cut fruit, bakery items like pies and loaves of bread and other store items that aren't already packaged and labeled.

Lieberman says that means each store has to send all of those items out to labs to be tested, do paperwork to justify the ingredient and nutritional information to the FDA and then create signage and train employees to use it.