The debate over whether adding salt warnings to restaurant menus has been nothing if not interesting. Health officials, you’ll recall, want warnings next to chain-restaurant menu items that contain at least a day’s worth of sodium, which the FDA defines as 2,300 milligrams. The National Restaurant Association, the main industry-trade group, says the warnings will be bad for business and will lead to warning fatigue among diners. But five days ago, a state judge denied the National Restaurant Association’s lawsuit to block the warnings, meaning things would proceed accordingly and the warnings would go into effect tomorrow. Now, though, there’s a new twist: Today, an appeals court is giving the NRA another chance.
That means the NRA has successfully managed to stop the warnings from going into effect, at least a little longer. The court agreed to the group’s request to delay the rule so that it could consider the NRA’s case that the restaurants it represents will suffer irreparable harm if salt labels become mandatory. If the group can make a convincing case, it may mean the salt warnings may never take effect. That might happen. The NRA, of course, fought the city government in the past, successfully blocking Mayor Bloomberg’s soda ban.
[Law360]
