Entrepreneur Sues USDA, FDA for Banning Verifiably Factual Labels on His Food Products

In 2019, Michelle Przybocki nearly died. She became ill from digestive complications, and later learned she had a severe case of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Michelle, a speech therapist from Las Vegas, managed to push through the illness, but her life would never be the same. From then on, she experienced debilitating pain every time she ate, sometimes immobilizing her for hours.

To reduce the pain to a manageable level, Michelle decided to adopt a special “low-FODMAP” diet. FODMAP is an acronym that stands for “fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols.” Essentially, FODMAPs are certain carbohydrates that are difficult to digest. Doctors often recommend low-FODMAP diets to people with IBS and other digestive disorders, and studies show most patients with IBS report significant improvement in their symptoms when they eliminate FODMAPs from their diet.

Michelle went looking for low-FODMAP foods, but found the search incredibly difficult because she couldn’t find any labels that mentioned whether a food was low in FODMAPs. She tried checking ingredient lists, but this also proved challenging, because different parts of the same ingredient can be high-FODMAP or low-FODMAP, and labels don’t normally specify which part was used. As a result, she would often spend hours in the grocery store scouring the shelves, desperate to find food she could digest more easily.

Michelle barely ate in the first few months because of this challenge, and experienced significant weight loss as a result. She was eventually able to piece together a low-FODMAP diet, but she and countless other people with IBS continue to face difficulty because of the lack of low-FODMAP labeling.

With 10-15 percent of the American population suffering from IBS, why are these labels practically non-existent?

Because they’re illegal.

Filling the Label Lacuna

Ketan Vakil found this out the hard way. Ketan is an entrepreneur in New York City, and he holds an MBA from New York University. Like Michelle, Ketan has a digestive disorder and follows a low-FODMAP diet to manage his symptoms.

Noticing the dearth of explicitly low-FODMAP foods in grocery stores, Ketan started his own business in 2018 to cater to this unmet demand. He called the business Gourmend Foods. When he started the business, Ketan had no idea about the ban, so he put labels on his products advertising the raison d’être of the whole product line, namely, the fact that the products were “digestible” and “gut loving.”

By the summer of 2022, Ketan was selling four low-FODMAP spice blends and a low-FODMAP chicken broth, mostly over the internet but also in a few retail stores. His products have all been certified by Monash University in Australia—a world leader in low-FODMAP foods—and he had no complaints or legal problems prior to last summer.