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House Education committee adopts H3 substitute shifting school food ingredient vetting to distributors, delays start date
Summary
At a meeting of the House Education and Workforce Committee, members adopted an H3 substitute for House Bill 4369 that shifts responsibility for vetting ingredients in school food from schools to food distributors, delays the bill’s start date to July 1, 2028, and removes titanium dioxide from the list of addressed ingredients, Representative Paquette, the bill sponsor, said.
At a meeting of the House Education and Workforce Committee, members adopted an H3 substitute for House Bill 4369 that shifts responsibility for vetting ingredients in school food from schools to food distributors, delays the bill’s start date to July 1, 2028, and removes titanium dioxide from the list of addressed ingredients, Representative Paquette, the bill sponsor, said.
The changes, Paquette said, came after committee feedback and expert consultation intended to strengthen the legislation. “The first, having the onus beyond distributors, food establishment distributors that are providing food to school to take the onus off of schools to be vetting the ingredients. That’s a big change that we added,” Paquette said. “The second 1 is we changed the start date, to 07/01/2028 so people can be prepared for the changes that this will, bring about.”
Paquette also said he consulted with Michigan State University researcher Dr. Norbert Kaminski, who discussed the safety profile of titanium dioxide. “He was very convincing in pointing out how titanium dioxide is quite the outlier among the other ingredients, and deemed relatively safe, especially with regard to this. So we removed that, as well based on his expert input,” Paquette said.
Committee members voted to adopt the H3 substitute on a roll call that the clerk recorded as 11 yes, 0 nay, 0 pass. Later in the meeting the committee voted to report House Bill 4369 as substitute H3 “with recommendation”; the clerk recorded 8 yeas, 0 nays and 3 pass. No further debate or amendments are shown in the meeting transcript.
The substitute’s three stated changes—shifting vetting responsibility to distributors, setting an effective date of July 1, 2028, and removing titanium dioxide from the bill’s scope—were presented by the sponsor; the transcript does not record additional witnesses or staff testimony about implementation, compliance mechanisms, enforcement, specific labeling requirements, or costs.
The committee then adjourned. The bill, as reported with the H3 substitute, will proceed to the next stage specified by House procedures.
