Sponsors (8)
The bill creates a clearer path for marketing and using zootechnical feed additives that could improve food safety and producer efficiency, but it imposes new compliance burdens, limits veterinary oversight, and restricts treatment claims in ways that may delay or complicate adoption of some beneficial products.
Consumers and farmers: reduced risk of contaminated meat because producers can market and use validated zootechnical additives shown to lower foodborne pathogens in animals.
Farmers and small producers: ability to advertise validated zootechnical effects helps them choose effective additives and may improve animal growth efficiency and production outcomes without classifying those products as drugs.
Manufacturers and state regulators: establishes a clearer food-additive petition pathway with specific data requirements, providing regulatory certainty and potentially speeding authorization of safe products.
Small manufacturers and farmers: new data and labeling requirements increase compliance costs and could delay market entry for zootechnical products, raising prices or limiting product availability.
Farmers and veterinarians: treating these substances as food additives rather than drugs may reduce veterinary oversight, increasing risks of misuse or adverse effects on animal health (with downstream food-safety implications).
Farmers and consumers: petitions denied for failing to prove intended zootechnical effects could block or delay adoption of promising pathogen-reduction tools, slowing potential public-health benefits.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Creates a new category for certain gut‑acting feed/water additives, treats them as food additives with petition and labeling requirements, and bars calling them drugs solely for gut effects.
Introduced May 22, 2025 by Roger Wayne Marshall · Last progress May 22, 2025
Creates a new legal category for certain non‑nutritive substances added to animal feed or drinking water that are intended to change digestive byproducts, reduce foodborne human pathogens in food animals, or alter the gut microbiome to affect structure or function. Those substances are treated as food additives, must follow the food‑additive petition and approval process, and must carry a label statement saying they are not for diagnosing, curing, mitigating, treating, or preventing animal disease. Sets detailed petition content and labeling requirements, allows the FDA to define permitted conditions of use, makes failure to demonstrate the intended zootechnical effect a basis for denying approval, and adds a misbranding penalty for omitting the required label statement. The Secretary may not require use of these substances.