Fast food executive Andrew Puzder, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be the next Secretary of Labor, has spent years fighting Obamacare as a businessman, and he’s specifically targeted onerous regulations dictating how chain restaurants must display calorie counts on their menus.
“It’s another one of these nanny state regulations that’s designed to solve a problem that isn’t really a problem at all,” Puzder, the chief executive of Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., told me in a 2011 interview about the rules.
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As he explained at the time, prior to Obamacare, fast food restuarants including his own displayed detailed nutritional information on posters in their restaurants as well as on their websites. The information included not only calories, but additional relevant information such as fat, sodium, and cholesterol.
But Obamacare didn’t merely dictate that calories had to be disclosed, but the manner in which they were displayed, creating more costs for business owners.
Puzder testified before Congress that changes would cost his company’s stores $1.5 million — the cost of building one and a half new restaurants.
As he described it to lawmakers, adding calorie information to the crowded menu boards in fast food restaurants means new signs, which take up more space and make it harder for customers to see into the food preparation area.
He also testified that, “Our drive thru menu boards are not amenable to menu labeling. They are simply too small and are designed for customer convenience and speed (which are generally the two reasons customers are in the drive thru to begin with). We are generally unable to make them larger as they are already as large as local zoning authorities allow us to make them. If we were allowed to make them larger, they would already be larger.”
Puzder also pointed to a number of studies showing that posting calorie counts did not change how people ate.
The criticisms are indicative of Puzder’s broadly libertarian economic views, as he’s been outspoken about government overregulation.
Lamenting the difficulty of doing business in California, he once noted that, “It’s easier to open a new restaurant on Karl Marx Avenue in Siberia than to open one in L.A.”
