Late last month, Florida’s Republican Representative Kat Cammack introduced a draft bill that could reshape how the FDA regulates ingredients in food — with potentially devastating consequences for transparency and state efforts to protect us from toxins in our food.
The FDA Review and Evaluation for Safe, Healthy, and Affordable Foods Act of 2026 (FRESH Act) is being framed by some as “modernization rooted in pragmatism,” reports Food Navigator1. However, critics have quickly jumped in to highlight the risks of cementing existing structural weaknesses in food safety legislation as law.
The bill would allow the FDA to rely on industry-funded expert panels to approve new food chemicals for immediate use, and would establish federal preemption over state food safety laws like California’s Food Safety Act. In other words, this legislation would strip states of their right to protect consumers and allow new food chemicals — including those linked to cancer — to enter the food supply with no federal government review.
What’s Going on Behind the Scenes?
“This extreme preemption language will hurt consumers but serves as a major win for big food companies, which last year launched a multimillion dollar effort to broadly preempt state safety and labeling laws,” says Sarah Sorscher, J.D., M.P.H., Director of Regulatory Affairs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI)2.
For the Environmental Working Group, a vocal critic of the new legislation, these modifications solidify the weaknesses in a system already riddled with loopholes. By reducing the amount of information food companies must provide to the FDA to prove a new additive’s safety, the FRESH Act just makes it easier for the food industry to sell us potentially harmful ingredients.
“I did not think it was possible to make our food system even weaker, but this proposal does it,” says Melanie Benesh, the Environmental Working Group’s vice president for government affairs3. “Blocking state action and further weakening FDA review of chemicals is the food industry’s dream come true: no state regulation, no federal regulation, no problem.”
What Does the Act Entail?
The proposed FRESH Act would amend the existing Federal Food, Drug, And Cosmetic act in three major ways. First, it would introduce a new category of “common food ingredients” including things that would have been ordinarily consumed or sold as food before 1958. This category will encompass fruits, vegetables, meat, nuts, legumes, milk from lactating animals, and traditional bacterial cultures, but also certain additives like emulsifiers, stabilizers, and preservatives.
For critics, this proposal could pave the way for loopholes that exempt historically acceptable additives from oversight, even if modern toxicological evaluation shows that they are not as safe as we have been led to believe. Butylated hydroxyanisole, for example, is an antioxidant first synthesized in the late 1940s that has since been described as “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen” by the National Institute of Health’s National Toxicology Program. It currently features on the FDA’s Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) list4.
The second and third modifications introduced by the FRESH Act would work in tandem to centralize FDA approval of new food additives. To start, the current voluntary GRAS notification framework would be replaced with a mandatory notification and public registry program. Then, the FDA’s authority to reassess and revoke GRAS status would be distilled into a two-part system, giving the FDA 90 days to review new safety claims, after which the substance would be approved by default. If an approved substance is later deemed unsafe, companies would generally have up to two years to phase it out.
Sources:
- https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Article/2026/04/24/fresh-act-2026-reform-or-risk-for-fda-food-safety/
- https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2026/04/fresh-act-is-a-rotten-apple/
- https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news-release/2026/04/fresh-and-affordable-foods-act-rotten-core
- https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-182
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