Leaders in the food, beverage, and household products industry are betting that improved ingredient transparency efforts will appease adherents of the Make America Healthy Again movement seeking tighter regulations to address chronic diseases in the United States.
The Consumer Brands Association, the largest trade association for food and beverage makers, is ramping up its promotion of initiatives like front-of-package labeling, QR codes for detailed nutritional information, and publicly accessible websites and registries for commonly used artificial ingredients.
Recommended Stories
Support for these types of transparency initiatives stands in contrast to more hard-line approaches from some MAHA advocates, who have asked the Food and Drug Administration to ban certain ingredients in the name of product safety.
Melissa Hockstad, president and CEO of the CBA, told the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview that companies voluntarily increasing the amount of information about ingredients in products is a step forward in achieving the goals of the MAHA movement, without sacrificing personal autonomy.
“I think having access to the information helps people really assess what it is that [they] personally need,” Hockstad said. “I always think about it: ‘My cupboard, my choice.’”
CBA represents many large players in the broader consumer packaged goods industry, ranging from food makers like Kraft Heinz, PepsiCo, Tyson, and Nestle to retailers like Target and Amazon.
The broader consumer packaged goods industry, including brands affiliated with CBA, contributed $2.5 trillion to the U.S. gross domestic product last year. Roughly 1 in 10 American jobs are created by CBA companies, to the tune of $1.5 trillion in wages and salaries.
Hockstad, who led a different trade association for cleaning products through the supply-chain shortages of the COVID-19 pandemic, said she has seen consumers become more interested in ingredients in their food and household goods since 2020. She says food manufacturers are doing their best to voluntarily meet these new demands.
“They’re interested in the science, and we are here,” Hockstad said. “Our member companies are here to make sure consumers have the information that they need.”
A plethora of products under CBA’s brands now include front-of-package labeling, known as Facts Up Front, that features a snapshot of metrics like calories, saturated fats, and sodium content.
According to a new study from the product research firm Nielsen Consumer, obtained by the Washington Examiner, 7 in 10 products on U.S. grocery store shelves now have Facts Up Front labels, up by 65% since 2021.
CBA has also increasingly encouraged its affiliates to use the program SmartLabel, a QR code CBA created in 2015 to provide consumers with more detailed information than what can fit on product packaging. The digital tool allows customers to do a deeper dive into ingredient definitions, allergens, and even package recycling instructions.
The CBA also presented new data that SmartLabel QR codes can be found on more than 100,000 different products made by 1,000 different brands across the U.S. market. Consumer engagement with SmartLabel codes rose by 43% from 2024 to 2025.
But more hard-line activists within the MAHA movement, such as the “Food Babe” Vani Hari and Turning Point USA podcaster Alex Clark, have called for more aggressive policy from the FDA to outright ban or prohibit certain ingredients from foods and personal care products.
Hari and others have highlighted that chemicals commonly used in American food products, including petroleum-based artificial food dyes, the dough conditioner potassium bromate, and the synthetic preservative propylparaben, have been either entirely banned or strictly regulated by health agencies in the European Union.
American cosmetic products also contain chemical agents like parabens and triclosan, but these chemicals have been entirely prohibited in the EU due to concerns over hormone disruption.
In the absence of FDA regulation, several states, including Texas, Louisiana, and West Virginia, have enacted state-level MAHA legislation to prohibit certain ingredients from grocery store shelves.
A policy analysis conducted by the lobbying group Americans for Ingredient Transparency, of which CBA is a part, found that such ingredient regulations will increase grocery prices by 12% for those states and their neighbors.
Hockstad said in a press release published Tuesday that “transparency and affordability go hand in hand.”
“While consumers want more ingredient transparency, they also want to be able to afford these everyday essential products,” Hockstad said. “That’s why Consumer Brands supports a consistent national framework for ingredient safety and transparency to replace the patchwork of state mandates that will drive up grocery costs.”
Hockstad’s group, along with several other trade groups, is encouraging Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leading voice in the MAHA movement, and members of Congress to develop nationwide standards to improve existing rules on ingredient transparency and safety.
On top of that list for Kennedy is reforming the “Generally Recognized as Safe,” or GRAS, standards, created by the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. The law allows companies to include ingredients in their products without going through rigorous safety trials so long as they are “generally recognized, among experts qualified by scientific training,” to be shown to have “reasonable certainty of no harm.”
Critics of of GRAS, including Kennedy, have denounced it as a loophole by which companies can include ingredients without being required to undergo FDA-ordered testing to prove they are safe for human consumption. Hockstad’s group says it welcomes GRAS reform so long as there is a national, uniform regulatory approach for new ingredients.
But Hockstad said any GRAS reform ought to include increased funding for the FDA to ensure the agency is equipped to conduct rigorous safety reviews. She said she also supports the creation of a national, public-facing registry of ingredients with health and safety information for those interested in more information.
The FDA’s Human Foods Program promised a new proposed rule tightening GRAS standards before the end of 2026, as well as the potential introduction of post-market safety reviews for ingredients previously admitted into the food supply under GRAS.
Acting FDA Commissioner Kyle Diamantas initially ran the Human Foods Program before being tapped to temporarily run the whole agency following the resignation of former Commissioner Marty Makary.
CBA has previously worked closely with the FDA on transparency and nutrition education initiatives, such as developing the standardized nutrition information labels on products in the 1990s.
NUTRTION TO BE ADDED TO DOCTORS’ LICENSING EXAMS THANKS TO RFK JR. PUSH
Hockstad said her organization has a history of taking part in “constructive engagement” with the priorities of the administration in power, regardless of party affiliation.
“It doesn’t matter who’s in charge, Democrat or Republican,” Hockstad said. “We’ve been around for a long time, so how do you find those opportunities to work together, and for us, it’s always making sure consumers have a wide variety of safe, affordable, and convenient choices for themselves and their families.”
