[aiauthoritydev]

Yes it does. It also good for the people with allergies as they can confidently buy that bread.

When FDA declares a new allergen, the top lawyer of the company that has presence from NY to SF seats down with the CEO, they then ask all the manufacturing units to do an audit of the said allergen use and then hire a third party auditor to verify if the allergen is used at all not just at their retail locations but in the entire supply chain. This involves the place where wheat is harvested to the restaurant where the bread is served. For a large company this is a millions of dollars and several quarters of project.

The lawyer and CEO needs to chalk out the plan. If they want to make sure their bread does not contain the said allergen they have to update all their processes right from where they buy their wheat to where they test their bread for the said allergen and retrain their staff, suppliers, QA etc. this adds millions of dollars in additional expenses per year.

Not only all this is complex that makes the bread expensive for EVERYONE, it is also much more prone to error.

It is much easier for your small local company to provide sesame free bread at slightly higher price to those who need it. You wont get it in the middle of death valley but that is fine.

[InDubioProRubio]

People with allergies and various food diggestion problems are not a real market for bread-makers. As in, they make sense for industrial products that do not spoil fast. Means, packaged goods, with lots of additives, tailored to them and a shelf life going into weeks.

Bread is made fresh every day, has a shelf-life of 3 days tops. The logistics are usually measured in hours. The effort to scrub the bakery, transport the gluten-free/nut-free/whatever every day, seperated is thus non specialized and a huge cost in addition to a production of a small facility. So you can get gluten-free bread by a industrial facility speacilized on it, wrapped in plastic. But you can not get it from your local bakery chain.

Add to that the legal damocles swoard hanging over you and mixed artisanal production of small quantities becomes fiscally irresponsible for small buisnesses. In theory you could open a bakery, tailored to a specific allergy set in a dense urban environment. But the rest of the world, a drive away from you, will not have that option.

[wolpoli]

> For a large company this is a millions of dollars

The FDA was expecting that companies spend millions to ensure that the products are free of sesame to help people with allergies, but companies realize that it's easier to just add sesame into their products.

I am not sure the government could do now to help people with sesame allergies. Ban sesame outright from certain products? Mandate that certain companies produce sesame-free products?

[VBprogrammer]

Adding an allergen in quantities where it has no meaningful effect is attempting to flout a regulation. It's like bringing money into the country by spitting it among fellow travellers. In a functioning system the authorities would have the power to investigate and use discovery to identify cases where allergens are being added deliberately for no other reason than flouting rules. They should then be able to issue substantive fines to encourage actual compliance.

Its not like adding small amounts of an allergen is a victimless. Lots of people with moderate to serious allergies eat things every day which "may contain" their allergen.

[robertlagrant]

It's not flouting a regulation at all. It's the opposite of flouting. It's complying.

[fullspectrumdev]

“Malicious compliance” can be read as “flouting” in some cases.

Eg: transaction structuring which is illegal in most places.