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Food Safety News publisher and attorney Bill Marler describes seven petitions submitted or being prepared for the FDA and USDA’s food-safety service. The proposals seek changes to testing, warnings, poultry controls, outbreak investigations and disclosure; the supplied report does not establish that agencies have acted on them.
Marler’s October 2026 Publisher’s Platform says the petitions were prepared with input from his law firm’s staff, scientists, physicians, families affected by outbreaks and other food-safety colleagues. He presents them as requests for agency action, not as rules already adopted. The report describes six proposals in detail and begins a seventh concerning disclosure of firms implicated in outbreaks, but the supplied text cuts off before completing that proposal.
Two FDA petitions address consumer-facing warnings. One seeks a prescribed label for cheese made with raw milk, a completed review of the agency’s 60-day aging rule, and validation by cheesemakers relying on aging to control pathogens. Another asks for warnings on packaged raw and lightly cooked sprouts, including sprouts sold in salads, sandwiches and wraps. Marler says FDA has advised higher-risk groups not to eat raw sprouts for 28 years, but that advice has not appeared on packaging.
A separate FDA request would add botulinum neurotoxin-producing clostridia to finished-product testing requirements for powdered infant formula and require testing of dairy-based ingredients. The report cites 52 infants hospitalized with botulism in the ByHeart and Nara Organics outbreaks since 2023, and says the organism was found in a dairy ingredient. Marler says 46 parents of 24 affected infants joined that petition as co-petitioners.
The poultry petition asks FSIS to classify Salmonella at or above 1 CFU/g as an adulterant in raw ground chicken, ground turkey and chicken parts, or, alternatively, to apply the determination to three Salmonella serotypes. It also asks the agency to begin verification sampling it had announced and later postponed, according to Marler. Another request would let FDA enter an animal feeding operation for limited sampling when the agency has determined in writing that the site is implicated in a multistate outbreak.
The requests target outbreak prevention
The proposals focus on points where consumers and investigators may have limited information or protection: whether products are tested for particular pathogens, whether a package communicates known risks, and whether agencies can collect evidence at a suspected source. If adopted, the requests could change testing practices, labeling and outbreak investigations. At this stage, those are potential effects, not outcomes.
The infant-formula proposal is tied to outbreaks in which the report says infants were hospitalized and an ingredient was implicated. Warning-label petitions would put risk information at the point of purchase or consumption, while the poultry and farm-access requests seek agency measures before or during investigations. The disclosure petition, as described in the available text, raises a separate question: when public-health evidence implicates a business, what information should authorities release to consumers?
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Earlier agency actions underpin petitions
Several proposals respond to earlier agency decisions described by Marler. He says FSIS determined in May 2024 that Salmonella at or above 1 CFU/g is an adulterant in breaded stuffed raw chicken products, while a broader proceeding on other raw poultry was withdrawn in April 2025. He also says verification sampling announced in 2024 was postponed indefinitely in December 2025.
For raw milk cheese, Marler argues that the federal 60-day aging rule dates to the 1940s and that FDA announced a reevaluation in 2013. He says the agency’s science does not show that aging reliably eliminates pathogens. For outbreak-site access, he points to a 2018 romaine investigation in which FDA found an outbreak strain in an irrigation canal beside a large cattle feedlot and collected six samples inside the operation.
The seventh petition concerns naming companies implicated in outbreaks. Marler cites a September 10, 2026, E. coli investigation and another involving ready-to-eat chicken wraps, saying public announcements did not identify the businesses and that a lawsuit revealed a brand in the latter case. The supplied source excerpt ends before the petition’s requested disclosure language is complete.
““This year I have spent a fair amount of time trying to put myself out of business.””
— Bill Marler, Food Safety News publisher and attorney
Agency decisions and filings remain open
The supplied report does not provide agency acknowledgments, docket numbers, formal filing dates for each proposal, or responses from FDA or FSIS. It is therefore unclear which petitions have been formally filed, whether any agency will open a rulemaking, and what timetable officials might follow. The platform’s descriptions are Marler’s account of the requests and the events behind them; they are not independent agency findings.
The available source text also cuts off during the seventh petition. It does not provide the complete proposed language or specify all categories of outbreak-related business information Marler wants FDA to disclose. Details of the cited outbreaks, including the full evidence linking particular firms or sites to contamination, are not fully set out in the supplied material.
Watch for agency responses
The next developments would be formal submission records, responses from FDA and FSIS, or announcements that either agency will consider the requests through guidance or rulemaking. Readers should look for the agencies’ own statements to confirm petition status, the evidence they review and any proposed timelines. Until then, the proposals remain requests for action, and no changes to the described rules are established by the source.
Key Questions
What are the seven petitions about?
They address infant-formula testing, raw milk cheese warnings, raw and lightly cooked sprout warnings, Salmonella controls for raw poultry, sampling access at outbreak-linked animal feeding operations, disclosure of firms implicated in outbreaks, and a seventh proposal whose full details are missing from the supplied source excerpt.
Have FDA or FSIS adopted any of the requested changes?
The supplied report describes petitions and requests; it does not say that either agency adopted them or committed to a timetable.
Who is behind the petitions?
Food Safety News publisher and attorney Bill Marler says his staff and colleagues helped prepare them, with input from scientists, physicians, food-safety advocates and families affected by outbreaks. He says parents joined the infant-formula petition as co-petitioners.
What would the infant-formula petition change?
It asks FDA to add botulinum neurotoxin-producing clostridia to finished-product testing requirements for powdered infant formula and to require testing of dairy-based ingredients used to make it.
What is known about the petition seeking disclosure of implicated firms?
Marler says it asks FDA to clarify that a firm’s identity, when implicated by epidemiologic and traceback or laboratory evidence, is not confidential commercial information. The supplied text ends before the petition’s full request is presented.
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