Sesame Was Added to More Products After FASTER Act Labeling Backfired

The FASTER Act (Food Allergy Safety, Treatment, Education, and Research Act) took effect on January 1, 2023, adding sesame as the 9th major allergen requiring declaration on U.S. food labels. The intent was to protect the estimated 1.6 million Americans with sesame allergies. The unintended consequence was the opposite: several major food manufacturers, including some large bakeries and bread producers, responded by intentionally adding sesame flour to products that previously did not contain it. Why? Because it was cheaper to add sesame as an ingredient (which triggers the standard "contains sesame" label) than to reformulate production lines, test for cross-contact, and implement the segregation needed to truthfully label products as sesame-free. This is a textbook case of regulatory capture producing the opposite of its intended outcome. Before the FASTER Act, a person with a sesame allergy could eat standard white bread from most brands. After the Act, several of those same brands added sesame to their recipes, making previously safe products now dangerous. The FDA acknowledged the issue in 2023 but stated it had no authority to prevent manufacturers from adding legal ingredients to their products. The impact on sesame-allergic consumers has been a contraction of their safe food supply at the exact moment when labeling was supposed to expand it. Online allergy communities documented dozens of products that added sesame post-FASTER Act, and parents reported having to eliminate staple grocery items their children had safely eaten for years. For a population that already navigates a restricted diet, losing access to previously safe foods is both practically difficult and psychologically demoralizing. This problem persists because the FASTER Act addressed labeling (disclosure) but not manufacturing practices (prevention). The law tells manufacturers they must disclose sesame but gives them full discretion over whether to remove it, add it, or prevent cross-contact. In economic terms, the law created a compliance cost for sesame-free production but no corresponding incentive to maintain sesame-free status. Rational profit-maximizing firms chose the cheapest compliance path: add sesame and label it. The structural root cause is that U.S. allergen law is built on a disclosure model borrowed from financial regulation: tell consumers what is in the product and let them decide. This model fails when the act of disclosure itself changes the underlying product. A disclosure-only framework cannot protect consumers if manufacturers can legally make products more dangerous as a compliance strategy.