There is a small ritual built into grocery shopping that most of us barely notice. You pick up a product, turn it around and read. Maybe you are checking the carbohydrates. Maybe it is the added sugar, the sodium or the protein. Perhaps you have a food allergy and go directly to the ingredient list. Whatever you are looking for, the assumption is the same: the information needed to make the decision is printed somewhere on the package in your hand.
Online grocery shopping has disrupted that simple arrangement. The package still has a back. The shopper just can't turn it around. That gap has become significant enough that the Food and Drug Administration plans to address it. As part of its 2026 Human Foods Program priorities, the agency says it intends to issue draft guidance for the food industry on labeling products sold through online grocery platforms. The FDA estimates that online shopping now accounts for more than 20 percent of grocery sales nationwide, yet some of the most basic information consumers expect to find on a food package — Nutrition Facts, ingredients and allergen declarations — can be missing or difficult to locate online.
The issue is not entirely new. The FDA began publicly examining e-commerce food labeling several years ago and in 2023 formally asked consumers, retailers, manufacturers and advocacy groups for information about what shoppers could actually see when buying groceries online. Among its questions were whether nutrition, ingredient and major-allergen information was consistently available, how it was displayed and how accurate it was.
The problem is easy to underestimate because online grocery shopping looks so much like ordinary shopping. There is a photograph of the box, a price and an “Add to cart” button. There may be marketing claims — keto, organic, high protein, no added sugar — prominently displayed beside the product. But the information required to evaluate those claims may take considerably more effort to find.
For someone casually comparing two brands of crackers, that may be an inconvenience. For someone trying to limit sodium or added sugar, it can interfere with an informed choice. For a shopper with a serious food allergy, the ingredient and allergen information can be essential.
The physical Nutrition Facts label was designed precisely to make comparison easier. Serving size, calories and nutrients appear in a standardized format, and the FDA explicitly encourages consumers to use the label to compare products. Online, however, the shopping environment introduces another layer between the manufacturer and the consumer: the website or app displaying the product.
That raises questions that did not matter much when food-labeling rules were built around shelves and packages. How prominently should nutrition information appear on a product page? Should shoppers have to enlarge photographs of packaging to find it? How quickly must a retailer update an ingredient list after a manufacturer reformulates a product? And who bears responsibility when the information online does not match the package delivered to the customer's door?
The FDA has not yet provided those answers. Its planned 2026 document is draft guidance, not a new regulation, and the agency's guidance agenda itself is not binding. The final recommendations could therefore look quite different from what consumer advocates or retailers expect today.
Still, the direction is important. Food shopping has moved onto phones and laptops much faster than the regulatory framework surrounding food information has followed it.
A consumer standing in a supermarket can pick up a package and investigate before deciding whether to buy it. A consumer shopping online should arguably not have to make the same decision with less information simply because the package is represented by a photograph on a screen.
The FDA's forthcoming guidance may begin to establish how that principle works in practice. The food label, after all, was created to help consumers make informed decisions at the point of purchase. Increasingly, that point is no longer a supermarket aisle. It is a screen.
SOURCES: FDA
Add comment
Comments