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Comment by decide1000 | Hacker News Reader

Why does it take so long? Existing EU recipes are already compliant Kraft’s European products have for years used natural colours such as turmeric, paprika, beet juice or no colouring at all. That is why the 2025 U.S. pledge to go dye free by 2027 is largely irrelevant on this side of the Atlantic. So 2027? That does not make sense at all.. it's a n economic perspective, not a healthy one.

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Supply chains.

EU and US supply chains are vastly different, plus shifting the production lines from one to another doesn't happen overnight. This means that it could well take two years to fully move all their production facilities off synthetic food dyes.

Tumeric sometimes contains lead. I think only in India so far, but the FDA is about to move lots of testing to the states. Hopefully on a roadtrip or layover you won't have to research each state you are in before eating.

Demanding an entire industry change everything overnight doesn't work. Suppliers have to ramp up production, processes have to be reworked, purchasing contracts have already been set a year in advance.

I don't understand why Americans accept this behavior from corporates. They are basically poisoning people for economic reasons. Why don't they use that extra profit, made over the health of millions, to speed up this process.

Because the USA politicians for the most part do what corporate interests want. When it looked like consumer interests might gain a foothold in 1960-1970s, a member of the US chamber of commerce wrote the Powell memo as a guide to corporate responses to consumer activism, this is still followed by USA corporations and he was appointed to US Supreme Court to put his influence on legal standards for generations. He’s not the first nor the last as traditionally in the USA due to how weak the framers made the federal government originally, a private public partnership is always exalted as the best of both worlds for governance but this leads to regulatory capture we have now without sufficient safeguards. edit: an adjacent comment mentions GRAS,Generally Recognized as Safe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generally_recognized_as_safe - laws in the USA last forever unless new laws supercede them so this law set in stone thousands of chemicals (including the aforementioned dyes) as safe because they didn't kill anyone quickly in 1958 and companies are free to use those in food - only a handful of items have been removed since then because the FDA is required to scientifically prove harm, unlike how those items got put on the list.

Guessing it's to ramp-up suppliers, change equipment over, and stockpile enough for the transition.

I understand the need to phase out/in ingredients in this situation, however I've never understood when there is a simple ban on an unnecessary ingredient why it takes long. I'm specifically talking about those "microbeads" in bodywash that were banned a few years ago. The companies got years to phase them out. They served no real purpose and were not replaced with anything. Companies just had to stop adding them to the bodywash - why give them years to do so? I get that labelling would be inaccurate so give them a few months to change that.

Of course the beads served a purpose: they were abrasive and exfoliating. And they were given time because they have to sell their existing inventory and use all the beads they already have purchased to put in their products.

Not sure why you're greyed out, because you're correct that those were literally exfoliant face washes. (No real loss in phasing them out because there are much better ways to exfoliate than rubbing your face with little pellets, but it wasn't some meaningless design choice.)

Sorry, yes I realize their purpose, but I meant the product still worked without them, so they could have stopped adding them and continue to sell the product. I guess the same is technically true for food dyes. I just mean that there are times where the ingredient is critical to the product, microbeads was not one of them.

With something like that it's tough, though, because they sold those as an _exfoliating wash_ product, but if you take away the beads it's not exfoliating anymore. So you'd either have to rebrand it to remove any mentions of exfoliation (at which point it becomes a totally different product) or rework the ingredients list to include a "chemical" exfoliant rather than the "physical" exfoliant (but that also drastically alters the product, especially since some people avoid chemical exfoliants).

Not defending microbeads—those products were truly shit, both for your skin and for the environment—I just want to illustrate that it might not be so straightforward.

I think we give these companies too much leeway. I live in Canada and there is a palpable hate on for American's following the "51st State" talk. This has led to increased patriotism and companies are cashing in. Within weeks, many retail products started to relabel and emphasize "Made In Canada". So it can be done, we shouldn't listen to them when they tell us "it's not that easy" because they've demonstrated it is easy when it means potentially more revenue.

And run out existing contracts with existing suppliers.

They'd have to scrap all the food currently in the production and distribution pipeline, plus there would be a gap in food delivery as producers switch over to a new process. It's less disruptive to transition gradually.

Similar to why the USAID closure was gradual and gave aid recipients plenty of time to find new donors, because we wouldn't want hundreds of thousands of women and children to die of starvation and disease just to save a few bucks or wring out more viral memes [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/us/politics/usaid-cuts-do... / https://archive.is/5BIAF

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