Today, U.S. Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Jim Risch (R-ID) led a bipartisan group of colleagues in calling out the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for letting non-dairy lab-grown products illegally label their products with dairy terms. The bipartisan group highlighted the proliferation of imitation products, specifically the new cell-based, lab-grown imitators that are using dairy terms like milk, cheese, and yogurt.
“For decades FDA has allowed non-dairy products to illegally use dairy terms to label their imitation products, most of which are nutritionally inferior to the real dairy foods they purport to emulate,” wrote the Senators in a letter to FDA Commissioner Robert Califf. “Public health is now facing a new, additional perpetrator – Cell-based dairy imitation products. These are synthetically created options posing as natural foods, many of which are nutritionally inferior to the dairy products they imitate.”
Current FDA regulations define dairy products as being from dairy animals, however, the FDA has failed to enforce these regulations, allowing non-dairy products to use dairy names, leading to the rapid growth of mislabeled alternative products that contain a range of ingredients and nutrients that are often not equivalent to the nutritional content of dairy products – including cell-based, synthetic dairy imitation products. By using dairy names like milk, these synthetic products are posing as natural foods, clearly violating the FDA’s standards of identity, which requires the food product be made from milk from an animal.
In addition to Senators Baldwin and Risch, the letter was co-signed by Senators Angus King (I-ME), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Tina Smith (D-MN), Susan Collins (R-ME), Roger Marshall (R-KS), and Mike Crapo (R-ID).
