Consumer groups to USDA: publish past-due rule on fresh chicken.

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 16, 1994--Consumer advocates Friday urged the U.S. Department of Agriculture to publish a past-due new rule on fresh labeling of poultry products after a federal appeals court said states could outlaw ads and store displays that depict frozen chicken as fresh.

On the grounds of federal pre-emption -- but not common sense -- the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said it "affirms the absurdity" of the current federal rule allowing frozen chickens to be labeled as fresh, but said stores can "still be required by state law to tell the truth in advertising and to display frozen chickens for what they are -- frozen."

"Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty may well be speaking for the federal bureaucracy when he says `When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less,'" wrote Judge Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain in a concurring opinion. "Let us hope that Alice's world can be confined to the Wonderland within the Washington Beltway."

Mark Epstein, executive director of Public Voice for Food and Health Policy said the court ruling puts additional pressure on the U.S. Department of Agriculture to announce its proposed rule sooner rather than later. USDA had promised members of Congress a decision by Thanksgiving, then said it would be out by the end of the year, but now says the decision won't come until January.

"With continued apologies to Lewis Carroll, USDA is `late, late, for a very important date,'" Epstein said. "USDA needs to clear up the image of fresh chicken that consumers see through the distorted Looking Glass of mislabeled chicken. We expect USDA to do the right thing and we encourage them to do it without delay."

Linda Golodner, president of the National Consumers League, said the court ruling at least provides some partial protection to consumers from deceptive marketing practices, which USDA could make complete by changing its standard.

"This ruling definitely turns up the heat on USDA to end this consumer deception," she said. "It's time for the agency to bring their rule-making process out of the deep freeze and tell us whether they are on the side of consumers or the big chicken producers."

Fresh-labeled chicken can sell for 40 cents to $2 more per pound than frozen chicken. Every day the USDA delays new truth-in-labeling regulation costs consumers millions of extra dollars they are unwittingly spending on frozen chicken they believed to be fresh because it is labeled as fresh.

Bill Mattos, president of the California Poultry Industry Federation, whose members sell only truly fresh chicken, said: "Only when the federal labeling laws are changed will all Americans be awarded the same protection against misrepresentation of product that California consumers enjoy as a result of this ruling."

The USDA allows poultry producers to label chicken as fresh even when it has been chilled as low as 1 degree Fahrenheit -- 25 degrees below the point at which chicken freezes. The producers ship the chicken frozen and then thaw it out in the grocery meat counter, where it is deceptively labeled and displayed as fresh. Consumer groups have urged USDA to change its standard to outlaw such labels on any chicken chilled below 26 degrees.

In California, the state legislature had passed a law outlawing labeling, advertising or displaying previously frozen chicken as fresh. That law had been struck down by a U.S. District Court and not enforced until the federal appeals court ruling, which came down late Wednesday.

CONTACT: National Consumers League

              Karen L. Bolte, 202/639-8140
                           or
              Public Voice for Food and Health Policy
              Allen Rosenfeld, 202/371-1840
                           or
              California Poultry Industry Federation
              Bill Mattos, 209/576-6355