Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rose to prominence in part by criticizing America’s reliance on ultraprocessed foods and promising to make the food supply healthier. On Aug. 10, he announced proposed changes to a longstanding U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) process that determines when food companies have to tell the agency that they’re adding new ingredients to the food supply.
Previously, food companies were permitted to determine on their own that some new food ingredients—often combinations of lab-manufactured chemicals—were Generally Recognized As Safe, or GRAS, and could decide whether or not to tell the FDA that they were including them in their foods. They did that by filing a GRAS notice with the agency at the same time that the food hit the market.
But because they were not required to file a GRAS notice, many companies didn’t. A 2026 analysis by the Environmental Working Group, a health-focused nonprofit, identified at least 111 food chemicals that companies had added to foods including cereal, snack bars, and sports drinks without informing the FDA.
“When I came to HHS, I asked the FDA how many ingredients we have in our food, and they said they didn't know. They said it could be 4,000, it could be 12,000, it's probably somewhere around 10,000,” Kennedy said at a press conference announcing the new rule. “We don't even know exactly how many chemicals are in the food that Americans eat every day, and the food industry continues to develop novel compounds and chemical combinations that do not exist in nature.”
The new announcement, if it becomes law, would make filing a GRAS notice mandatory, meaning that any time a company adds a new chemical to a food sold to the public, it has to file a notice with the FDA.
“By proposing mandatory GRAS notifications, we are closing critical information gaps and giving the FDA greater visibility into substances entering the food supply,” said acting FDA commissioner Kyle Diamantas at the press conference about the new proposed rule.
The proposal now has to go through a lengthy rulemaking process, and experts say that the food industry is likely to pursue litigation, which could further delay the rule from going into effect.
What the new rule would potentially do
Food industry experts say the new rule is a good start, though they had some caveats. Melanie Benesh, vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group and one of the authors of the analysis of chemicals in the food supply, calls it a “critical first step.” But “whether it will make our food safer, whether it will create real enforcement against bad actors, those things are all less clear.”
After all, she says, companies can still add new ingredients to foods and put them into the market at the same time they’re telling the FDA about those new ingredients. Right now, the FDA is under-resourced and may not have time to review the notice until long after the food has reached the public, she adds.
“We don't know what happens without more FDA resources,” she says. “The FDA already struggles to review what's on its docket now.”
There’s still no information about how thorough the FDA reviews will be, she says, and what the enforcement mechanism is if the FDA ends up disagreeing with the food company that the food is safe.
In other industries, companies have banded together to contribute “user fees,” which are payments of participating companies, to fund agency reviews, says Jennifer Pomeranz, a public-health lawyer and professor at the NYU School of Global Public Health. The generic drug industry, for example, found that user fees sped up review timelines and so requested Congress to implement them. Other times, Congress can add user fees. The FDA needs some sort of funding—like user fees—if it is going to be able to truly review the GRAS notices that companies submit, she says.
Ideally, she says, the FDA would require a pre-market review for new ingredients so that it could ensure their safety before they’re added to the food supply. (New color additives, for instance, are not allowed to go through GRAS and must be pre-approved by the FDA before they’re added to food.) But that might be difficult to enact in the current political climate, she says.
“MAHA conflicts with MAGA,” she says, because MAHA (the Make America Healthy Again movement) wants to force food companies to be more transparent about their ingredients, while MAGA (Make America Great Again) is about deregulation. Bloomberg News recently reported that the Trump Administration delayed a long-awaited definition of ultra-processed foods because of pressure from food industry CEOs.
Closing the GRAS loophole
The GRAS loophole has led to illnesses in the public, which is one big reason it needs to be closed, says Thomas Galligan, principal scientist for food additives and supplements for the Center for Science in the Public Interest. In 2022, the company Daily Harvest used a new substance called tara flour in one of its plant-based products, which would become linked to hundreds of instances of people getting sick. The company had not filed a GRAS notice about the substance, and in 2024, the FDA determined that the substance was not generally recognized as safe.
“I think the people who had to have their gallbladders removed from eating tara flour would argue that the impacts of the GRAS loophole are very real,” Galligan says.
Galligan says he hopes that the proposed rule will change how companies act, but points out that it could be years before it actually goes into effect. The last time the FDA proposed changes to a GRAS rule was in 1997, he says; the changes were finalized in 2016.
That’s why he is looking to states to pass their own GRAS rules, a move that would force companies that sell food in those states to change how they operate. A bill that recently passed the New York Assembly and Senate and was sent to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desk would generally make it illegal to sell or use certain GRAS substances in food unless a company has made a detailed, publicly available report about that ingredient to the New York Department of Agriculture.
Similar bills are being considered in California and New Jersey, he says.
“We hope all these states and additional states will continue to advance GRAS reform at the state level,” he says, “because it's really uncertain what is going to happen federally.”