RFK Jr. Says Ultra-Processed Food Definition Awaiting Approval

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said his administration has written a definition for what constitutes ultra-processed food and it’s awaiting approval by the White House.

“One of the problems with regulating ultra-processed food is there is no definition,” Kennedy said Tuesday at the International Fresh Produce Association conference. “We’ve developed a definition for it,” he said, noting that the proposal was currently awaiting review by the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees federal rulemaking.

It was not clear whether other agencies, including the US Agriculture Department, had seen a final version of the definition, or cleared it, according to a person familiar with the matter. Last summer, federal agencies began a joint effort to define ultra-processed food, which Kennedy has said is harming Americans’ health.

Kennedy and other top officials have said such a definition potentially could be used on product labels in an effort to nudge consumers to reach for healthier items.

“We anticipate that we’re gonna be able to do a final publication over the next couple of months and as soon as we do that, we’re going to then go to front-of-package labeling,” Kennedy said Tuesday at the conference.

That could pose challenges for the packaged food industry , which has pushed back against efforts to classify foods by their level of processing, saying that could inadvertently ensnare some healthier items like yogurt. Many consumers already are reaching for less-processed items with shorter ingredient lists.

“There’s no agreed-upon scientific definition,” of an ultra-processed food, said Rhonda Bentz, executive vice president of public affairs at Consumer Brands Association, which represents major food companies, including PepsiCo Inc., Conagra Brands Inc., JM Smucker Co., Kraft Heinz Co. and others.

“What they’re finding is that this is a lot harder than we thought,” she told reporters earlier Tuesday. The term can be “used to decide what’s a winner and a loser in the food space,” which “doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in terms of determining food policy,” Bentz said.

On Monday, Claudine Kavanaugh, director of the Office of Nutrition and Food Labeling at the Food and Drug Administration, said one challenge is that scientists are still trying to understand whether it’s the level of processing or the nutrients in ultra-processed items that is associated with poor health outcomes.

“There’s a lot of gray areas, given the conflicting information that’s out there,” she said at the produce conference. She added the administration had received around 5,000 comments when it requested information on how to define ultra-processed food.

These products typically involve some industrial steps or ingredients, unlike whole foods such as fruits and vegetables. Many packaged foods are generally considered ultra-processed.

Kennedy said regulators are currently considering a color-coded label — “red light, green light, yellow light” — for package labels to visually show their health. Such a step would go beyond what the Biden administration had previously proposed: a front-of-package label that would show whether an item’s levels of saturated fat, sodium and added sugars are low, medium or high.