I understand that alcoholic beverages are regulated by the ATF and not the FDA, which is why nutrition fact labels aren’t legally required on alcoholic beverages, but why does this carry over to NA beer?
It’s basically just beer-flavored soda. It has less than the required alcohol content (<0.5%) to be legally classified as an alcoholic beverage. Is it not regulated by the FDA?
The only clue I have is that Nutrition Fact labels appear on cans of NA beer made by companies that only produce NA beer (e.g. Athletic / Partake), but not NA beers produced by existing full-alcohol breweries (e.g. Heineken / Guinness). Is there some sort of “we also produce alcoholic beverages” loophole to avoid FDA regulation?
If so, would it be possible for Coca-Cola, who distributes alcoholic beverages (e.g. Topo Chico hard seltzer / Jack & Coke premixed cocktails), to get around the requirement for their regular sodas?
This is it. The law is likely written in a way that exempts all non-alcoholic beer and the brewing industry doesn’t want to touch that law at all since it would likely lead to all alcoholic products being required to publish nutritional information rather than just non-alcoholic products.