New York’s Menu-Labeling Mandates Will Make Dining Out More Expensive

A recent profile in the New York Times highlights mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani’s “lifelong love of eating.” Mamdani has tied this passion into his campaign, championing the cause of affordable eating for New Yorkers with his call to end “halalflation” and “make halal eight bucks again.” But some of Mamdani’s most vocal supporters on the New York City Council are offering a foretaste of a future Mamdani administration—and it won’t include cheaper food.

A recently introduced city council bill seeks to impose new sodium and sugar labeling mandates on all New York City restaurants. The mandates will increase costs for businesses and raise prices for consumers—without having an appreciable effect on New Yorkers’ health.

This proposed bill builds on earlier labeling mandates. In 2015, New York became the first American city to mandate that chain restaurants with 15 or more outlets include a high-salt warning next to any menu items with sodium that exceeded the recommended daily maximum for adults. Earlier this month, the state’s 2023 Sweet Truth Act went into effect, requiring chains with 15-plus outlets to include menu labels for items with 200 calories or more of added sugar.

One of the main defenses of nutritional labeling mandates like New York’s is that they have, so far, applied only to large chain restaurants and corporate establishments—presumably those best equipped to absorb the added costs.

But the proposed new bill shows that the end game is universal compliance. Under the new law, all Gotham restaurants—including independent eateries and small businesses—would have to place warning symbols next to high-salt and high-sugar items on both online and print menus.

The bill already has 13 cosponsors—a built-in voting bloc representing more than a quarter of the council. Given that many of the cosponsors prominently feature on Mamdani’s endorsements page, a Mamdani victory in the mayoral election would likely boost the chances of the bill’s passage.

The problem with these mandates is that they make food more expensive. At the federal level, trade associations estimated the total compliance costs of the FDA’s 2018 nutritional labeling requirements for calorie counts at $1 billion just for U.S. grocery stores alone. The FDA estimated the per-item cost for nutritional analysis of a menu item at a restaurant to be between $280 and $1,030, with extra costs for updating menu boards ranging anywhere from $591 to $1,773. That doesn’t include ongoing costs for new food offerings or updated menus.

Even more modest estimates of compliance costs would have a major effect on New York City’s smallest restaurants. These businesses are notoriously low-margin operations, so added costs will likely get passed along to consumers in higher food prices.

There’s also little evidence that menu-labeling mandates lead to healthier ordering. A Health Affairs study of New York City’s calorie-labeling requirement for chain restaurants found that after an initial wave of consumers used the new nutritional information (likely due to what could be called a “novelty effect”), there was “no statistically significant changes over time in levels of calories or other nutrients purchased or in the frequency of visits to fast-food restaurants.” A New York University study, using Newark, New Jersey, as a control, likewise found “no statistically significant differences in calories purchased before and after labeling.”

Even in the few studies that have found some effect from menu-labeling rules, the impact has been so modest as to be negligible. The most on-point study, which looked at New York City’s sodium-labeling menu rules for chain restaurants, found no evidence of a reduction in sodium intake among New Yorkers after the 2015 mandate.

Menu-labeling requirements drive up costs for businesses and consumers while delivering little measurable improvement in public health. Until now, New York City’s smallest restaurants have been spared the burden. Their reprieve may soon end.