Too much information: mandated menu labeling not healthful for consumers or the food industry

Nation's Restaurant News, Nov 17, 2003

Ever since the U.S. Surgeon General reported in 2001 that obesity might be responsible for as much death and disease as cigarettes, the foodservice industry has been harried by critics who charge it with contributing to America's weight-gain woes.

On the one hand, a few highly vocal trial lawyers have assailed the industry for "corporate irresponsibility," branding it as the next "Big Tobacco" and vowing to make chains pay huge, multimillion-dollar settlements. Restaurants, for their part, have been buoyed by early courtroom victories and widespread consumer support as evidenced by several polls.

On the other hand, another less noisy but perhaps more harmful challenge has presented itself--one that industry officials believed had been overcome more than a decade ago. Federal and state lawmakers, who also maintain that the industry is contributing to the obesity problem, believe that the issue can be addressed through new regulations, namely, nutritional menu labeling.

The latest manifestation of that fundamentally flawed piece of reasoning is a bill that was just introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn. Called the "Menu Education and Labeling Act," the measure would require all foodservice chains with 20 or more units to post calorie, sodium, saturated-fat and trans-fat content for each item on hand-held menus. Chains that don't use individual menus would have to list the number of calories for each item on their menu boards.

The bill is not particularly revolutionary. It resembles other measures that had been introduced by legislators at the state level. Currently, nutritional-labeling bills are being considered in California, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington, D.C.

Nor is it the first time the issue has been explored at the federal level. Congress considered--and rejected--the same fundamental proposal when it passed the Nutritional Labeling and Education Act in 1990, which required that food manufacturers include nutrition information on all packaged foods.

Rep. DeLauro has gone on record as stating she is aware that the restaurant industry has its own share of problems these days, and she is not looking to make things more difficult. She just wants to educate consumers about the food they eat in restaurants.

And that is well and good, if it is indeed what people want. But even that is unclear. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, between 1980 and 1999 the number of people who are characterized as being obese jumped from 15 percent of the population to 27 percent. And for the last 10 of those 20 years, a wealth of nutritional data has been readily available on packaged goods. That raises the question of whether anyone actually reads those labels.

But even disregarding that argument, nutritional labeling in restaurants as it has been suggested by lawmakers simply is impractical. One major problem with it is that customization plays too big a role in what people order. For example, a sandwich that might come with five items can be combined 120 different ways. A sandwich with 10 items yields no fewer than 3.6 million possible combinations. How can that many nutritional permutations be jammed into a menu or on a signboard? That is not a problem manufacturers have to worry about when they label packaged goods. They have one set of ingredients and one set of nutritional data--period.

A second wild card in foodservice operations that makes menu labeling unrealistic is the human factor. Let's face it. Even with all of the best systems in place, portion control in a restaurant kitchen is not an exact science. If a restaurant claims that a pepperoni pizza contains "X" grams of fat, and someone in the kitchen drops a couple of extra slices on it, that number is right out the window. And, as a result, a restaurateur could find himself suddenly in violation of the new law, as well as laws that prohibit false advertising, and wide open to lawsuits.

Moreover, if such a federal or state law were to pass, it is almost certain that lawsuits would not be far behind. Who could blame a 20-unit chain operator for claiming he is being discriminated against when the independent operator down the street does not have to dip deep into his pockets to calculate and then list all of the nutritional information required by law?

Mandatory nutritional menu labeling is just not the way to go. While critics claim that Web sites and in-store brochures that are readily available on counters are either difficult to navigate or occasionally hard to find, they still present a workable--and, best of all, voluntary--solution to a tricky problem. If operators have such information, they should flaunt it as a marketing tool and a point of differentiation.

Since the restaurant industry is a business that works hard to respond to its customers' demands, if it becomes apparent that the public wants nutritional information, restaurateurs certainly will find the best way to give it to them.