Whether you're giddy with excitement or paralyzed with fear, welcome to 2025. Every January, we look at changes coming for the food & beverage industry in the new year. But in my 20-plus years here, I can’t recall an incoming year with so much potential for change.
I’m not just talking about the Trump administration, which is returning to the White House – although that’s a big part of it. Even before last November’s election, there were forces pushing the FDA, especially, and the USDA too, to improve their oversight of the nation’s food supply and quicken enforcement.
For 20 years here and 10 elsewhere, I’ve been writing about the glacially slow food safety process, concerns over synthetic ingredients, especially colorants, and the effectiveness of inspections and oversight in general. Things really could change in 2025, and not just because of the new administration. Events in 2024 put in place several things that need to be addressed in 2025.
Leaders of hostile Senate committees will change to more business-sympathetic Republicans, but even they can’t be deaf to consumers who are asking, “why are there so many food recalls?”
Members of both parties have questioned how food or ingredient manufacturers can self-assert that a new ingredient is safe. Critics claim that between 2000 and 2022, manufacturers were allowed to self-certify almost 99% of the 756 new chemicals used in food.
I understand the Generally Recognized As Safe process; it’s efficient, but that doesn't make it right. I think it’s on the way out.
And what will become of the new profanity “ultraprocessed” in the new year? At first, all the concern baffled me, but it sure picked up steam. Will it go the way of genetically engineered ingredients (GMOs) and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which had runs at the top of the news a decade or so ago and have since faded into non-issues?
Even if that’s the path for ultraprocessed, anyone in this business for more than a few years should remember how contentious and long-running the debates over GMOs and HFCS were, and how uncertain their futures looked for a while. Ultraprocessed probably will go away, but not before it inflicts a lot of pain on food & beverage processors, and regulators too.
Finally, there’s the elephant in the room. Politicians of all stripes can be caught saying one thing and doing another, at least some of the time. In my mind, Donald Trump is the epitome of that … and maybe that’s a good thing for the food & beverage industry.
What Trump says versus what he does are two different things, and I don’t think that characterization bothers him. Make Mexico pay for a border wall? Take ivermectin for Covid? Pull the U.S. out of NATO? Outrageous as they sounded in the 2016-2020 timeframe, they were means to an end, probably never the intended goal. For 2025, add to that list the annexation of Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal, immediate peace in Ukraine and universal tariffs, among other things.
Just read his book; the title says it all: “The Art of the Deal.” The book coined the phrase "truthful hyperbole" as “an innocent form of exaggeration, and a very effective form of promotion.”
So stop fearing or fighting him and start working with him, or at least around him. I don’t mean that in the congenial, collaborative sense. There will be things he wants to hear and see, which outnumber the things he really wants to accomplish. Less overall regulatory oversight but at the same time a crackdown on the FDA? Mass deportations of immigrants (maybe some of your employees) but an expansion of the H-1B visa program? An end to climate change mitigation efforts (and, by extension, sustainable agriculture)?
They’re great campaign talking points – they won him the election – and they deserve some dialog and maybe even compromise from food and other affected industries. But I bet the issues behind those 2024 hyperboles will still be around in 2028, although maybe in slightly altered forms.