A federal appeals court has rejected arguments that Louisiana’s food-labeling law infringes on the First Amendment rights of plant-based food companies whose marketing campaigns often compare their products to meat.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on April 12 overturned a district court ruling that sided with the Tofurky brand in its lawsuit against the labeling law. The company had argued that the text of the food-labeling law encompasses the “non-misleading labeling” used on Tofurky’s products, including plant-based vegan sausage, veggie burgers and hot dogs.
Louisiana state officials, however, argued that the law applies only to intentional efforts to claim a plant-based product is actually made from beef, pork or other meats.
“The state’s construction limits the act’s scope to representations by companies that actually intend consumers to be misled about whether a product is an ‘agricultural product’ when it is not,” the appeals court’s decision states. “This interpretation is not contradictory to the act, and we thus accept it for the present purposes of evaluating Tofurky’s facial challenge.”
Both Tofurky and the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry expressed satisfaction with the court’s decision.
“We are pleased with the recent decision by the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the state’s Truth in Labeling of Food Products Act, the purpose of which is to protect consumers from the intentional misbranding or misrepresenting of any food product as an agricultural product,” the state’s agriculture commissioner, Mike Strain, said in a statement emailed to the Louisiana Record.
Tofurky’s CEO, Jaime Athos, contends that Louisiana lawmakers did the bidding of animal agriculture lobbyists in approving the food-labeling act four years ago.
“But the court’s ruling neutralized those unconstitutional efforts and restored some fairness to the marketplace,” Athos said in a statement emailed to the Record. “It’s unfortunate that so many public resources were wasted in this futile effort to limit competition for animal products, but the plant-based industry can rest easier knowing that their right to truthfully market their products is no longer threatened in the Fifth Circuit.”
Because the court narrowed the law’s application to efforts to intentionally mislead consumers about food products such as veggie burgers, the Louisiana law is now aligned with federal and state consumer protection laws, reducing potential ambiguities about the enforcement of that law, he said.