On November 6, FDA will hold the second of its public meetings on what it calls Challenges and Solutions in Lot-Level Food Traceability. Anyone who wants to speak must register by October 26, six days from today, and no same-day registration is allowed. Written comments are due December 6 in Docket No. FDA-2014-N-0053. The meeting is billed as a chance to talk about implementation. Read the notice closely and it is something narrower: a conversation about how to make the rule’s core requirement, the lot code, easier to live without.
So here is where the Food Traceability Rule stands, how it got here, and why, more than fifteen years after Congress ordered it, FDA cannot spend a dollar enforcing a single line of it.
What the rule does
Section 204 of the Food Safety Modernization Act, signed in January 2011, told FDA to identify the foods most often tied to outbreaks and to require anyone who manufactures, processes, packs or holds them to keep more and better records. Those foods are on the Food Traceability List: leafy greens, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, melons, sprouts, fresh herbs, fresh-cut fruits and vegetables, shell eggs, nut butters, soft cheeses, finfish, crustaceans, some shellfish and ready-to-eat deli salads.
For those foods, the rule requires companies to record key data elements at critical tracking events, harvesting, cooling, initial packing, shipping, receiving and transformation, and to tie them together with a traceability lot code assigned when the food is first packed and carried down the chain. When FDA asks during an outbreak, a covered company must produce an electronic, sortable spreadsheet within 24 hours. FDA estimated the rule would reach more than 323,000 domestic businesses operating about 484,000 establishments, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Before the rule, most food handlers only had to know one step forward and one step back, and farms and restaurants did not have to keep even that. FDA’s own pilot projects, run by the Institute of Food Technologists in 2011 and 2012, found that one-up, one-down records often could not connect the restaurants and grocery stores where people got sick to the farm that grew the food. That is the gap the rule was written to close, and the lot code is what closes it.
The calendar
Congress gave FDA until January 2013 to propose the rule. FDA missed it. The agency did not deliver its report to Congress on the pilot projects until 2016. In 2018 the Center for Food Safety and the Center for Environmental Health sued, and a consent decree set the schedule FDA finally met: a proposed rule on September 23, 2020, and a final rule on November 21, 2022. It took effect January 20, 2023, with compliance set for January 20, 2026. That three-year runway was already a year longer than FDA had proposed, granted because industry asked for it, and at the time FDA said it would go no further. In September 2023 the agency added that it would not begin routine inspections until 2027.
In January 2024 the Government Accountability Office told FDA to finalize and document an implementation plan to hit the 2026 date. Two months later, Rep. Scott Franklin of Florida introduced H.R. 7563, which would have relieved retailers, restaurants and warehouses of the duty to keep and pass along lot codes and required more FDA pilot projects before any enforcement. It never got a vote. Its ideas went into House agriculture appropriations bills instead.
On March 20, 2025, FDA announced it intended to push compliance back 30 months, to July 20, 2028. I wrote at the time that FDA had again kicked the rule down the road. The agency’s stated reason was that even the companies ready for January 2026 depended on supply chain partners who were not, and it said plainly that the extension did not amend, and that it did not intend to amend, the requirements of the rule. The proposed rule to extend the date was published August 7, 2025. As far as I can find, it has never been finalized. It did not need to be.
Congress finished the job. On November 12, 2025, the bill that ended the government shutdown, H.R. 5371(Public Law 119-37), carried Section 780 of Division B, which says no funds appropriated by the Act may be used to administer or enforce the rule before July 20, 2028. The same section told FDA to meet quarterly with farms, restaurants, retailers and warehouses to identify and implement flexibilities for satisfying the lot-level tracking requirement, to give industry guidance on food waste recovery, reclamation, intracompany transfers and customer returns, and to test its own internal tracing system. As I explained in August, that distinction matters. A delay is an agency asking for patience. A funding bar is Congress taking away the agency’s ability to change its mind.
Why it has not been implemented
There are three honest answers, and they overlap.
The first is that part of industry asked for the delay, and its own filings say so. When I went through the federal lobbying disclosures in August, the International Foodservice Distributors Association described its fourth-quarter 2025 work on the rule as support for the 30-month extension and targeted flexibilities. The National Restaurant Association listed H.R. 5371 by number, for provisions regarding FDA traceability, in the quarter it became law. The National Retail Federation reported in 2024 that it sought support for H.R. 7563. Jessica Glenza at the Guardian named Publix among the companies lobbying on the rule.
The members of Congress who carried that ask should be named, because their names are on the record. Rep. Scott Franklin, a Florida Republican who lives in Lakeland, where Publix is headquartered, introduced H.R. 7563 and is vice chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration. Rep. Sanford Bishop, a Georgia Democrat, was its lead cosponsor; he is the subcommittee’s ranking member and chaired it in the 117th Congress. Rep. Jimmy Panetta, a California Democrat whose district runs down the Monterey County coast, cosponsored it. And Rep. Andy Harris, a Maryland Republican, chairs the subcommittee whose fiscal 2025 bill and fiscal 2026 bill, H.R. 4121, carried H.R. 7563’s language. The fiscal 2026 version became Section 780. Harris also wrote the fiscal 2027 bill the House passed in June. Two Republicans and two Democrats, three of them sitting where FDA’s money gets written. The bill they introduced died. Its provisions did not; they became law through the one committee where they never needed a hearing, a floor debate or a vote of their own.
The Senate did not go along. In Senate Report 119-37, Senate appropriators directed that FDA may not use funds to delay enforcement beyond July 20, 2028, and that full compliance and enforcement begin by then. Section 780 is a House product.
The second answer is that the industry’s argument is not frivolous, and I should say so. Traceability only works when everyone in a chain is doing it. The 2024 Reagan-Udall Foundation roundtables found low awareness of the rule among small and foreign suppliers and nonchain restaurants, and distributors have real problems with mixed-lot pallets and pick slots. But Kroger, Albertsons and Walmart built programs to the rule before the delay was announced, and Western Growers says its members have collected this shipment data voluntarily for more than a decade. The associations that lobbied for the delay represented the ready and the unready alike. They spoke for the unready.
The third answer is that FDA is not ready either. Section 204 also directed FDA to build an internal system to receive and analyze traceability data. In January 2026 GAO reported that the system still does not exist. FDA told GAO in March 2025 it would be done by January 2026; after the delay, it moved that date to July 2028, too.
What happened while we waited
FDA has now closed its investigation into the largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history: 12,883 confirmed illnesses, 570 hospitalizations and two deaths in 21 states, linked to shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico. Leafy greens are on the Food Traceability List. FDA held its first lot-level public meeting on June 15; CDC puts the first illness on June 14. A Michigan epidemiologist spent the first two weeks of July asking where the lettuce came from. In the meantime, lettuce sales fell, and California growers plowed under healthy crops that had nothing to do with the outbreak. That is what happens when the answer takes twelve days instead of one: the innocent pay for the guilty.
On August 12, eleven consumer, public health and labor organizations in the Safe Food Coalition asked congressional leaders to rescind Section 780. The International Fresh Produce Association says it opposes further delays, and Taylor Farms says it supports traceability legislation. Congress has not acted. The House passed its fiscal 2027 agriculture and FDA bill, H.R. 8646, on June 4 by a vote of 213 to 210, and bill summaries say it carries the same bar on enforcement before July 20, 2028. The Senate has not passed its version.
Where things stand today
On February 19, FDA announced a final exemption for certain cottage cheese, a draft question-and-answer guidance and a series of stakeholder sessions organized by the Partnership for Food Traceability, an industry membership nonprofit. The first session, on March 6, was open only to the partnership’s members.
On October 8, FDA issued draft guidance saying it would not enforce the rule against retail food establishments and restaurants whose average food sales over the previous three years are more than $250,000 but not more than $1 million, adjusted for inflation from 2020. Businesses at $250,000 and under were already exempt. FDA says the new carve-out covers only a small share of food sales while relieving many small operators. Maybe so. It is also the first time the agency has moved the rule’s boundary since Congress told it to look for flexibilities.
And then there is November 6. According to the Federal Register notice and Food Safety Magazine’s summary, FDA wants to hear about a “reasonable range” of traceability lot codes for distributors shipping to retailers; “inferred” lot codes, where a distribution center calculates rather than scans what it shipped; key data elements for individual items no longer in a case; returns and reclamations; food waste recovery; intracompany shipments; retailers that transform food and send it to other stores; and whether industry should settle on a data standard. FDA’s earlier discussion paper and the comments on it are in the docket.
Look at where every one of those topics sits. Distribution centers, grocery stores, restaurants, the back half of the chain, the same link H.R. 7563 tried to cut. The lot code is the rule. A “reasonable range” of lot codes is a range of possible farms, and a range of possible farms is what investigators have today.
Industry, it is your turn
The consumer, public health and labor groups have done their part. Eleven of them signed the August letter. They should not be the only ones asking.
The companies that are already ready have more to gain from this rule than anyone, and they have been far too quiet. So, by name. Kroger, Albertsons and Walmart built traceability programs before the delay was announced; you are the proof that the rule works, and Congress needs to hear it from you. The International Fresh Produce Association says it opposes further delays. Taylor Farms says it supports traceability legislation. Western Growers has already written its members a guidance document on how to comply. The California and Arizona Leafy Greens Marketing Agreements set the food safety rules for the crop at the center of this summer’s outbreak. Put your names on a letter to House and Senate leadership, and to Senators John Hoeven and Jeanne Shaheen, who lead the Senate appropriations subcommittee, asking that Section 780 be rescinded and kept out of the fiscal 2027 bill in conference.
To FMI and the National Grocers Association, which applauded the delay, and to the International Foodservice Distributors Association, the National Restaurant Association and the National Retail Federation, whose filings asked for it: your members include the companies that are ready. Let them speak for themselves on November 6, and do not ask FDA to carve the lot code out of the back half of the chain on their behalf.
And to everyone who grows, packs, ships or sells a food on the list: comply now. Nothing in Section 780 stops a company from keeping lot codes and producing that 24-hour spreadsheet tomorrow. Do it before the 2027 growing season and say so publicly. If the companies already doing this asked Congress to unwind the delay, the argument that industry cannot manage the rule would collapse, because it would be industry saying otherwise. California’s growers learned this summer what it costs when nobody can draw a line around one facility. This rule draws that line.
What I would say on November 6
If you care about this, register to speak before October 26 and file comments by December 6. Here is what I would ask for. No flexibility that lets the lot code stop at the distribution center door. Any flexibility FDA does adopt should first be tested in a real or simulated traceback, the same pilot-project standard the industry demanded of the rule itself. And FDA should repeat in public what it told Congress and the courts: that the full public health benefit of the rule depends on every covered entity complying.
And to Congress: rescind Section 780, keep it out of the fiscal 2027 bill, and let the Senate’s own language, full compliance and enforcement by July 20, 2028, and not a day later, survive conference this time.
Congress ordered this rule in January 2011 and set a deadline of January 2013. If nothing else slips, enforcement begins in July 2028. That is fifteen and a half years from deadline to enforcement. The records the rule requires already exist, in some form, in warehouses and distribution centers across the country. The only question left on November 6 is whether they will follow the food all the way to the people who eat it.
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