The National Mandatory Bioengineered (BE) Food Disclosure Standard (NBFDS), published on the Federal Register at the following link came into effect as of 1 January 2022.
Pursuant to its publication, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) obliges food producers, importers and retailers to include the presence of genetically modified ingredients on their labels, marking them as ”Bioengineered”.
The mandate exempts companies with annual sales totalling less than $2.5 million and, more generally, products containing less than 5% of genetically modified ingredients.
The provision is part of the new USDA rules on controversial bioengineered crops and ingredients and sets a uniform national labelling standard for bioengineered food products, overriding the State provisions currently applied. Based on the USDA definition, it will be up to single companies to determine the products requiring the new marking on the label.
For the time being, products made with new gene editing, synthetic biology and CRISPR techniques (which can be used to modify small portions of genes in the cell) are excluded from this provision.
