Farm to Fork Legislation
The State of California has passed numerous bills that relate to Farm to Fork issues. Some of the bills are listed below. For more details on each piece of legislation, including the full text and vote history, please visit California’s Legislative Information page.
AB 2413
(Pérez, 2014) officially created the Office of Farm to Fork within the Department of Food and Agriculture and charged the Office with increasing access to healthy foods for underserved communities and schools in California.
AB 1321
(Ting, 2015) established the California Nutrition Incentive Program, which provides grants to organizations offering incentives to low-income shoppers using CalFresh and other benefits to purchase healthy, California grown fresh fruits, vegetables, and nuts.
AB 954
(Chiu, 2017) Food Labeling: quality and safety dates. This bill requires the Department of Food and Agriculture, in consultation with the State Department of Public Health to publish information to encourage food manufacturers, processors, and retailers responsible for the labeling of food products to voluntarily use uniform terms on food product labels to communicate quality dates and safety dates. In addition, the bill also requires the Department to encourage food distributors and retailers to develop alternatives to consumer-facing “sell by” dates.
AB 822
(Caballero, 2017) Choose California Produce Act: This bill requires California state owned or run institutions (excepting public universities, colleges, and school districts) to purchase California grown food when the cost does not exceed 5% more than the lowest bid and the quality is comparable.
SB 862
(Budget Act of 2018) established the Healthy Stores Refrigeration Grant Program (based on AB 2335), which provides grants for energy efficient refrigeration units in small businesses located in food deserts. The bill also established the EBT Fruit and Vegetable Pilot Project (based on SB 900), which directs the Department of Social Services to modify the state EBT system to track and store nutrition incentives for CalFresh customers and to create a grant program to test the new system.