With just days left in the Biden administration, the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday unveiled its highly anticipated proposal to require manufacturers to display nutrition information on the front of packaged foods.

The proposal is several years in the making. The agency in 2022 announced its intention to develop a rule on such labeling during the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health. FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf had said that the proposal was on his list of priorities before the end of his tenure.

The FDA cites the growing prevalence of diet-related chronic diseases like Type 2 diabetes, hypertension and some types of cancers as creating a need for the rule.

The rule would require food manufacturers to display saturated fat, sodium and added sugar content on the front panel of products — nutrients that are overconsumed by Americans. It would also require companies to denote whether the food is “low,” “med,” or “high” in those nutrients based on the percentage of its daily value outlined by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

“The science on saturated fat, sodium and added sugars is clear,” Califf said. “… We are fully committed to pulling all the levers available to the FDA to make nutrition information readily accessible as part of our efforts to promote public health.”

If finalized, the rule would give companies making at least $10 million in annual food sales three years to come into compliance with the rule. It would give companies making less than $10 million in sales per year four years to come into compliance.

The FDA estimates that the rule would cost the food industry on the whole about $333 million per year to implement, including both to comply with the rule and any reformulations that companies carry out as a result of it.

Rebecca Buckner, associate deputy director for human food policy at the FDA’s Human Food Program, said on a press call Tuesday that they expect some companies may move to reformulate products to have a lower content of some of the outlined nutrients.

In response to a question about the timing of the proposal, Robin McKinnon, acting director of the Nutrition Center of Excellence, said that diet-related chronic diseases is an “urgent” issue and the rule has been a priority for the agency in recent years.

The issue of nutrition and processed foods has taken shape on Capitol Hill in recent months. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who then was chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, slammed Califf last month, asserting that the agency was dragging its feet on the proposal

On Tuesday, Sanders, now the ranking member of the HELP Committee, called the proposal “pathetically weak,” and called for it to be “substantially improved.”

The proposed rule, he said, “fails to adequately warn the American people of the dangers of consuming these unhealthy products. Adding insult to injury, the FDA is giving corporations three years to put these labels on the front of their packages. That is absurd.”

He said he will reintroduce legislation to require the food and beverage industry to put strong warning labels on their products, adding that the measure would also ban junk food ads targeted at kids.

The next administration will ultimately decide whether to finalize the rule. Nutrition and ultraprocessed foods have been priorities for President-elect Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary selection, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Marty Makary, Trump’s pick to lead the FDA, has also touted the need to bolster nutrition, especially for children. He supports using nutrition to treat chronic diseases like diabetes and obesity, rather than relying on pharmaceuticals like GLP-1s.

“The bigger question is, is this the road we should be going down as a society, just medicating all of our problems,” he said on the “Will Cain Show” this past September. “Maybe we need to talk about school lunch programs instead of putting all our 6-year-olds on Ozempic as the American Academy of Pediatrics has suggested.”

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