Food Manufacturers Will Improve Transparency Of Additives

By Sam Lewis

In an effort to increase additives transparency, the Grocery Manufacturers Association — with companies such as Kellogg, PepsiCo, and Heinz — says it will provide the FDA access to a database of documents created by its members regarding additives and the generally recognized as safe process.

The Pew Charitable Trust believes nearly 10,000 additives are currently permitted as food ingredients and nearly half, 43 percent, of those fall under the FDA’s GRAS (generally recognized as safe) definition. GRAS lets food makers use science and research to establish if an ingredient is safe, thus bypassing FDA approval.

Transparency In The Food-Supply Chain — Imperative For Satisfaction & Safety

Feeling pressure from consumer advocate groups, the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) says more information will be made available to the FDA regarding the way chemicals are used in food production. According to Dr. Leon Bruner, chief science officer for the GMA, the plan “will strengthen the food safety programs used by the entire food industry, and thereby provide consumers more assurance that food products produced by U.S. manufacturers are, and will remain, the safest available in the world.” The FDA has also felt pressure from these consumer and health groups to improve oversight of GRAS review, which opponents of argue gives too much autonomy to food makers.

A number of different issues came together in GMA’s decision to give the FDA more information about additives used in making processed foods. Included in them are: the food supply chain’s growth to global proportions, a lack of conformity in regulations from country to country within supply chains, along with food companies creating new products with complex ingredients which raises alarm regarding safety and allergies. According to Eluned Jones, head of economics at South Dakota State University, the food industry has been moving toward this idea of transparency, and ultimately safety, for years. “It’s not reactive, it’s proactive; we’ve been moving toward this, let’s just make it more formal,” says Jones. “This is just an increasing awareness and a response to a growing bundle of knowledge in terms of how foods, food ingredients, particularly very minor ingredients by volume, can actually have an impact.”

Food Producers: Consumers Demand Transparency

However, according to Laura MacCleery, chief regulatory affairs lawyer with the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest, the GMA’s decision exposes flaws in the system, along with the lack of knowledge and data the FDA lacks on ingredients used in the food supply chain. “The FDA has become too reliant on the corporations’ own safety evaluations. A voluntary submission fails to fix the core problem,” says MacCleery. “Whether these companies’ evaluations are submitted on paper, assembled in a new database, or gift-wrapped with a bow tied around it, it’s no substitute for having independent and rigorous evaluations of suspect additives used in our food.”