The menu regulations that come with Obamacare are effectively making it difficult for small businesses to operate, according to Mary Lynee Carraway, majority owner and president of Domino’s Pizza Team Washington.
Carraway, whose 74 stores in the D.C. metro area boast more than $70 million in annual revenue, spoke at the Heritage Foundation’s Bloggers Briefing on Tuesday. She was accompanied by Daren Bakst, a Heritage research fellow in agricultural policy. The duo set forth the challenges Obamcare unnecessarily places on small businesses — especially pizza franchises like Domino’s.
Under the Affordable Care Act, restaurant chains are required to put up menu boards that detail caloric and nutritional information for the standard food options sold in that store. The Food and Drug Administration is making sure this provision is implemented, at a cost to the private sector of an estimated $97 million to $537 million.
Carraway said that the regulations make no sense for Domino’s. There are more than 34,000 different ways to craft a pizza and the requirements call for menus to reflect the calories in an entire pizza, instead of individual slices. Plus, the majority of pizza orders come in from the Internet, where Domino’s already supplies tons of nutritional information. Aside from that, no one uses a menu at a store to order pizza, she said.
“Just think to yourself, how many times have you walked into a Dominos pizza store… and thought, ‘Oh, I wonder what I’m going to order today’?” she told the crowd at Heritage. “I don’t think anyone does. I’ve known what kind of pizza I like since I’ve been about 12 years old.”
She said the requirements put in place by the Affordable Care Act harm her store managers, who make their profit off what their stores make. On top of that, her competitors — mom and pop shops — don’t have to follow the same requirements, since they aren’t chain stores.
According to the FDA, the signs are meant to “assist consumers in making healthier dietary choices.” But Bakst doesn’t see it that way.
“The government thinks that people cannot make informed choices about what they eat and that the government — all knowing that it is — knows what’s best for Americans,” he told the crowd at Heritage. “The idea is actually to try to change consumer behavior.”
He added that consumers often call for nutrition information themselves and that government doesn’t need to meddle in that process. Then business owners are left to decide if complying with those demands will give them a competitive edge. The FDA, which is forced to implement the Obamacare nutritional information provision, has acknowledged that consumers do often ask for that info, Bakst added.
But then, Bakst said, the FDA justifies the government intervention by saying that consumers are still not making healthy choices, so the information provided to them by restaurants must not be sufficient.
He also noted that many people aren’t looking to eat healthy when they’re at restaurants. They might offset a high calorie meal with lower calorie meals the rest of the day, or the may exercise regularly.
“When you go to a steakhouse, you don’t go for the kale,” he joked.
Bakst and Carraway condemned the FDA’s one-size-fits-all mentality. Instead, the two support “The Common Sense Nutrition Disclosure Act,” which would find a happy medium between giving consumers nutritional information and not imposing burdens on businesses.
Ultimately, however, eating healthy at a pizza place comes down to the individual consumer.
“It’s a matter of choice,” Carraway said.
