Just four days before the regulations were suppose to go into effect, Trump's Food and Drug Administration quietly delayed rules requiring restaurants to post calorie counts on their menus.
That may sound like a industry-friendly decision, but in this case it isn't because the industry asked for it.
Even though the FDA touted the delay as a way to reduce costs and increase flexibility for businesses, the change did not come early enough to save these companies any money. Many had already spent millions of dollars printing and shipping new menus to thousands of locations across the country so they would be ready for the original May 5 deadline. [...]
The restaurant industry itself — the second-largest employer in the country — actually lobbied alongside consumer advocates for the federal labeling mandate as a way to fix to the messy and expensive patchwork of state and local laws that had cropped up at the behest of health advocates across the country.
The good news is an overwhelming majority of business have already adopted the Obama-era regulations, something which we may even take for granted now.
Whether they'll continue to comply with the now-delayed regulation remains to be seen but, as Politico points out, they've already spent money manufacturing new labels and menus. Spending even more money to create new labels that don't list calorie counts wouldn't make much sense, would it?
It may make sense if posting calorie counts were actually hurting business enough to warrant spending money on labels that don't list calories, but has anyone even made that claim much less substantiated it?
Speaking as just an average consumer, calorie counts have definitely influenced my choices and prompted me to avoid certain items, but that doesn't mean I'm spending less money on food; it simply means I'm spending it on other things.
You might say the invisible hand of the Free Market has guided my choices, but Free Market Jesus would probably say foods should not be labeled.