The FDA and HHS sent a white paper to the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) regulatory review office on August 3, 2026, defining ultra-processed food. This document, filed as a notice, creates no binding labeling or formulation requirement by itself.
The Senate is pushing for legislative action with the Childhood Diabetes Reduction Act (S.5026), which cleared committee 12-10 on July 22, 2026. This act would require the FDA to put warning labels on the front of ultra-processed packages and ban junk food advertising aimed at kids.
California already has a legal UPF definition in force, built on functional ingredients and nutrient thresholds that match neither the FDA’s nor Congress’s approach. Three definitions are live at once, and they don’t agree with each other.
The FDA’s white paper carries a RIN, 0910-ZD60, and is not a proposed rule, an advance notice of rulemaking, or a guidance document. It’s filed as a notice, which means it has no legal deadline and no “economically significant” designation.
Publishing this paper won’t put a new label on a package or take an ingredient off a formulation. It puts a federal definition on paper that anyone can point to, but whether it ever becomes enforceable is a separate decision the administration hasn’t made yet.
A proposed rule comes with a comment period, a target date, and a legal path to enforcement. A white paper doesn’t, so it won’t force labeling and formulation changes on food manufacturers. Getting from this paper to an enforceable standard means a separate rulemaking for each one, with its own notice-and-comment process and timeline.
The FDA also filed this notice alone, without the USDA, which regulates meat, poultry, and school meals. This gap has to close before any single national standard could apply across the food supply.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he’d rather get to reformulation through voluntary industry commitments than a lengthy rule. This is a stated preference with no rulemaking or date attached to it yet.
Two Senate bills, the Childhood Diabetes Reduction Act and the Food Labeling Modernization Act, are writing their own definitions of ultra-processed food. These definitions conflict with each other and with the FDA’s definition.
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The Childhood Diabetes Reduction Act would require warning labels on the front of ultra-processed packages based on added sugar, saturated fat, sodium, or high-intensity sweeteners past a threshold. The Food Labeling Modernization Act, on the other hand, would write FDA definitions for “ultraprocessed” and “not ultraprocessed” into a standardized front-of-package labeling system.
A product could clear the FDA’s definition and still get a warning label under one of the Senate bills, or the reverse. This means that food manufacturers will have to deal with multiple definitions and requirements, which will be challenging to manage.
California’s AB 1264 is a third definition, and it’s already law. It defines a covered product as anything containing at least one listed functional ingredient combined with a nutrient threshold.
The FDA definition isn’t the finish line, and it might not even ship as a rule. Building a multi-year reformulation plan around one specific definition means betting capital on a document that may not become binding.
Congress and California are moving faster than the FDA, and either can take action first. The FDA’s white paper doesn’t even have a date attached to becoming a rule.
With three incompatible definitions in play, the near-term work is measurement. Whether a SKU trips a functional-ingredient threshold, a nutrient threshold, or a NOVA-style processing category are three different questions with three different answers.
Most reformulation teams are still answering them by hand, SKU by SKU, across whatever data holds the formulation information. This is the same data-fragmentation problem showing up in food manufacturing audits research across the sector.
Nobody has finished writing the rule that will eventually apply to food labels. Three separate groups are drafting three separate answers at the same time. Whichever one lands first, the plants in the best position that day will be the ones that already knew where every SKU stood under all three definitions.