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Committee approves H-3 substitute for bill shifting school food ingredient vetting to distributors
Summary
The House Education and Workforce Committee approved an H-3 substitute for House Bill 4369 that pushes ingredient-vetting responsibility from schools to food distributors, delays implementation to July 1, 2028, and removes titanium dioxide after sponsor cited expert input.
The House Education and Workforce Committee approved an H-3 substitute for House Bill 4369 on a unanimous roll call, moving the measure forward after the bill sponsor described three substantive changes.
Representative Paquette, the bill sponsor, told the committee the substitute shifts the responsibility for vetting ingredients away from schools and onto food establishment distributors that supply school food, changes the bill’s start date to July 1, 2028, and removes titanium dioxide from the list of regulated ingredients after consulting an expert at Michigan State University. "[Dr. Norbert Kaminski] was very convincing in pointing out how titanium dioxide is quite the outlier among the other ingredients, and deemed relatively safe," Paquette said while summarizing why the ingredient was removed.
The substitute was adopted on the first roll call (clerk announced 11 yeas, 0 nays, 0 passes). Representative Paquette then moved to report House Bill 4369 as the H-3 substitute with recommendation; the clerk recorded the committee vote as 8 yeas, 0 nays, 3 passes, and the motion prevailed.
Paquette said the changes responded to feedback received after earlier testimony and were intended "to make the legislation as strong as possible." He described the distributor-focused approach as intended to "take the onus off of schools to be vetting the ingredients," and said moving the effective date to July 1, 2028, would give affected parties time to prepare.
Committee proceedings included a formal roll call and no recorded amendments to the H-3 substitute during the meeting. The committee chair declared the motion to report the bill with recommendation carried following the second roll call, and with no further business the committee adjourned.
The transcript indicates the committee previously took testimony on the bill several weeks earlier; the H-3 substitute was offered by Representative Paquette at this meeting and adopted before the committee reported the bill with recommendation.
