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# Texas Wrote Food Brands an Exit From Its Own Warning Label and Most of Them Have Not Read It
- URL: https://giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io/draw-it-in-2026/
- Published: 2026-09-16T15:17:17.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-16T15:17:17.000Z
- Description: A federal judge froze Section 9 of SB 25 in February, but only against four trade associations and their members. The part nobody reads: the warning only attaches to a label developed or copyrighted on or after January 1, 2027. That is 107 days out and your art director controls it. Plus the post,
- Author: giovanni gallucci
- Tags: Label Claims, Clean Label, Ingredients, Packaging, Organic Social, Brand Positioning, Food and Beverage Weekly

*Listen to this episode of the Food and Beverage Trend Report, then use the piece below.*

I went looking for the Texas warning label deadline this week, and one of the first pages I landed on was a [label printer telling food brands to begin compliance planning immediately](https://www.videojet.com/us/homepage/resources/learn/texas-food-labeling-law-sb25.html?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io). A federal judge blocked that requirement on February 11\. The page is still up. They sell label printing.

Nobody here is lying to you, exactly. Half the industry filed Texas SB 25 under solved back in February and quit reading. The other half sells packaging. Both are expensive ways to be wrong, and the gap between them is where your next artwork decision is sitting right now.

Here is the actual state of play. The dates are the story, so I am going to give you all of them.

[Texas SB 25](https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/89R/billtext/html/SB00025F.htm?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) was signed June 22, 2025 and took effect that September 1\. Section 9 adds Section 431.0815 to the Health and Safety Code, and it requires a food manufacturer to put one sentence on any product sold in Texas containing one of 44 listed ingredients: "WARNING: This product contains an ingredient that is not recommended for human consumption by the appropriate authority in Australia, Canada, the European Union, or the United Kingdom." The 44 include blue 1, green 3, red 40, yellow 5, yellow 6, titanium dioxide, BHA, BHT, propylparaben, DATEM, partially hydrogenated oil, bleached flour and lye. Restaurant food is exempt. So is product regulated by USDA FSIS, and so are dietary supplements.

On December 5, 2025, four trade associations sued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Western District of Texas: the American Beverage Association, the [Consumer Brands Association](https://www.linkedin.com/company/consumerbrandsassociation?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io), the National Confectioners Association, and FMI, the Food Industry Association. On February 11, 2026, Judge Alan Albright [granted their preliminary injunction](https://www.haynesboone.com/news/alerts/an-update-on-warnings-on-texas-food-labels-administrative?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io). He found the warning is government scripted speech, applied strict scrutiny, and held that Texas never argued why the law survives it. Nine days later, the Texas Department of State Health Services published its final implementing rule anyway.

Paxton appealed on March 5\. The district case was stayed April 9 and the hearings were cancelled. The Fifth Circuit has the record and has not ruled. The most recent entry on [that docket](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72001665/american-beverage-association-v-paxton?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) is a lawyer withdrawing on August 27.

So the law is on the books, the rule is final, the case is frozen, and January 1, 2027 is 107 days from today.

## The injunction is a membership benefit

Read what the order actually does. It stops the attorney general from enforcing the warning against the plaintiff associations and their members while the case is pending. That is the entire scope of it.

If you make hot sauce in Lockhart or roast coffee in Alpine and you do not pay dues to one of those four associations, nothing that happened in February happened to you. The big houses went and bought a shield. Nobody bought you one.

I could spend three paragraphs on how that sits with me. Skip it, because you do not need their shield. Texas already wrote you a door.

## The trigger is your artwork, not the calendar

Section 19(b) of SB 25 says the requirement applies only to a food product label "developed or copyrighted on or after January 1, 2027."

Read that again with your art director in the room. January 1 is not a compliance date. It is a trigger on your own artwork. A jar sitting on a Texas grocery shelf in 2029 wearing a label that was drawn in 2026 is clean, and it stays clean.

That is not a clever lawyer's reading. It is the state's reading. In the proposed rule preamble, the health department wrote that "If labels are never changed, businesses are not required to comply." When a commenter asked the department to confirm that a label existing before January 1, 2027 would carry no new obligation, [the department agreed on the record](https://www.sos.texas.gov/texreg/archive/February202026/Adopted%20Rules/25.HEALTH%20SERVICES.html?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) and said no grace period would be needed, because those labels were developed before the date. That exchange is sitting in the February 20 Texas Register. A [plain reading of the statute](https://nationalaglawcenter.org/maha-movement-new-texas-and-louisiana-laws?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) gets you to the same place, and Louisiana's version has no equivalent carve out at all.

Texas published a road map for never complying with its own statute. I have read a lot of rule preambles. That one is unusual.

## What it actually costs you

Your artwork revision calendar is now a legal instrument. Starting January 1, every label refresh carries a new line item, and the line item is a sentence about Australia on the front of your package.

That flips two decisions most brands were planning to make lazily. If you have a refresh slated for 2027, move it into 2026 and you buy yourself years. And if you have been putting off reformulating out of one of the 44, run that number again this week, because relabeling only postpones the problem while reformulating walks you out of the regime entirely.

Then there is the situation almost nobody is treating as an opportunity. If none of the 44 are in your product, you can say so publicly right now, in 2026, with no lawyer and no label change and no waiting on the Fifth Circuit. The 44 are public record in the Texas Health and Safety Code. The state of Texas wrote you a checkable content calendar and then spent nine months in court over it.

## The post, the still and the video

Pasteable copy, for the brand that comes back clean. Fill in your own number and do not run it if the number is wrong.

*"Texas has a list of 44 ingredients it wants flagged on food packages. We pulled every spec sheet we have this week to see where we would land. All \[N\] of our products came back clean, and not because we planned around a law. It is the same list we have been working off since we started. The 44 are public record, Texas Health and Safety Code 431.0815\. Go look up anything in your pantry. Ours included."*

Still direction. Overhead, natural window light, one printed page of your own ingredient spec on the work surface, a pen next to it, and one of your products just inside the frame with the ingredient panel facing up. The back of the package, not the front. Shoot it so somebody can actually read the panel when they pinch to zoom. No graphics, no arrows, no red circles. If the panel cannot survive being read, the post is a lie and you should not run it.

Video, 25 seconds, five shots, shoot it today on a phone.

0:00 to 0:04, hands setting a printed list down on the counter. Voice over: "Texas has a list of 44 ingredients." 0:04 to 0:10, close on your own ingredient panel, held steady and readable. "This is ours. Read it." 0:10 to 0:16, wide of the room where the product actually gets made, with whoever actually makes it in the frame. "Nothing on that list is in here, and nothing on it ever was." 0:16 to 0:21, back to the list, a finger running down the column. "The list is public. Texas Health and Safety Code." 0:21 to 0:25, static on the panel, no voice over, no music sting, no logo card.

Three rules on that video. Nobody says the word warning. Nobody names another brand, because the moment you do this stops being a fact about you and starts being a fight you did not need. And if you cannot hold the ingredient panel steady and readable for four straight seconds, you do not have this post yet.

Before any of it, do the boring one. Pull your last twelve months of artwork revisions and count them. If you touched your label three times this year, you are going to touch it again in 2027, and you will be making a decision you have not thought about yet while a printer waits on the file.

## The show

This week's [Food and Beverage Trend Report](https://giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io/food-and-beverage-weekly/) is about three stories that turned out to be the same fear in three costumes: somebody bigger or richer or faster is about to copy you, and you are trying to work out what is actually yours. Four associations buying an injunction their dues payers get to stand behind belongs in that same drawer. The show is the briefing. This is the extension. What you post on Thursday is the part that matters.

Subscribe on [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1896775833?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) or [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/033jPRykJcvZDhtgSwZBhf?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io).

If you are working out which of these your brand is, and when to move the artwork, I am easy to find on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/galluccinet?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io).