Law & Policy Active Updated Jul 10, 2026
The plant-based labeling wars
Can a plant-based burger be called a burger, and oat drink be called milk? Since the EU's top court reserved dairy words for animal products in 2017, meat and dairy lobbies have pushed naming bans through parliaments, agencies and statehouses on both sides of the Atlantic, and courts have thrown most of them out. As of July 2026, the EU deal restricting 31 animal-meat terms while sparing burger and sausage has cleared its final Parliament vote, 560 to 75, and waits only on the EU Council; in the US, Arkansas's ban fell in court and the FDA has blessed soy milk.
The story so far
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Jul 10, 2026 Latest
France's top administrative court struck down the country's national ban on using meat-related terms like 'steak' and 'bacon' for plant-based products, ruling the ban conflicts with EU law, Totally Vegan Buzz reported.
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Jun 16, 2026
The European Parliament's Strasbourg plenary adopted the farm supply chain regulation carrying the naming rules, 560 votes to 75 with 25 abstentions. Veggie burger and vegan sausage survive; steak, bacon and 29 other animal terms will be reserved for meat once the Council of the EU gives its formal approval.
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Mar 5, 2026
Negotiators struck a deal: 31 animal terms, including chicken, beef, steak and bacon, will be off-limits on plant-based labels, while burger, sausage and nuggets survive. Producers get three years to sell through existing stock. The compromise still needed adoption by the Agriculture Council and a final Parliament vote.
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Dec 11, 2025
Trilogue negotiators failed to agree on the naming ban and pushed the file into 2026. Consumer groups, businesses and campaigners had lined up against restricting 29 meat-related terms. 'It's frustrating that we keep losing time on a proposition of a veggie burger ban,' said Dutch MEP Anna Strolenberg.
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Oct 8, 2025
The European Parliament voted 355 to 247 for an amendment by French MEP Celine Imart to ban meat-related names, from burger and sausage to steak and bacon, on plant-based packaging across the EU. Five years earlier the same chamber had voted the other way; the fight moved to trilogue talks with the Council and Commission.
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Jan 28, 2025
France's Conseil d'Etat annulled both naming decrees, from June 2022 and February 2024, applying the EU Court of Justice's October ruling that 'France cannot prohibit the use of common names of foods of animal origin to market foods containing vegetable proteins.' The state was ordered to pay 3,000 euros each to the French Vegetarian Association, Proteines France, the European Vegetarian Union and Beyond Meat.
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Jan 6, 2025
The FDA issued draft guidance for plant-based alternatives to meat, seafood, eggs and dairy: name the plant, as in soy-based cheddar cheese or black bean mushroom veggie patties, rather than plant-based chicken alone. The recommendations are non-binding, and milk alternatives keep their separate 2023 guidance.
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Oct 4, 2024
Ruling on France's decrees, the EU Court of Justice held in case C-438/23 that where no legal name has been adopted, a member state may not prohibit terms traditionally associated with animal products for foods made of vegetable proteins. Steak and sausage stayed legal on Europe's plant-based labels.
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Feb 22, 2023
The FDA proposed guidance blessing the names shoppers already use: a plant-based drink may be called soy milk or almond milk, paired with a voluntary statement on how its nutrients compare with dairy milk. The agency discouraged generic names like plant-based milk that hide the plant source.
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Sep 30, 2022
A federal judge permanently struck down Arkansas's label law as unconstitutional and entered a permanent injunction, noting the state had not produced 'any evidence of broad marketplace confusion.' The ruling ended a three-year fight and left producers free to keep saying veggie burger in Arkansas.
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Jun 29, 2022
France published Decree 2022-947, banning meat words like steak for plant-protein foods. The Conseil d'Etat, the country's highest administrative court, suspended it on July 27, before it could take effect, in a challenge brought by the plant-based sector.
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Aug 11, 2021
A federal judge ruled California could not stop Miyoko's Creamery from calling its product vegan butter or from using cruelty-free and its Revolutionizing Dairy with Plants tagline. Judge Richard Seeborg wrote that the state's showing of marketplace confusion around plant-based dairy was 'empirically underwhelming.' The state won one point: 'hormone free' was misleading, since plants contain hormones.
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May 25, 2021
Amendment 171 was dropped in the CAP trilogue negotiations before it could become law. A public petition against what campaigners called plant-based dairy censorship, led by ProVeg, Upfield and Oatly, had gathered 456,000 signatures, and all three EU institutions agreed to discard the amendment.
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Oct 23, 2020
The European Parliament rejected Amendment 165, the so-called veggie burger ban that would have barred burger, sausage, steak and escalope for plant-based foods. The same day it passed Amendment 171, extending the dairy-name rules to descriptors like yoghurt-style and cheese alternative.
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Dec 11, 2019
A federal court blocked Arkansas from enforcing Act 501, which barred words like burger, sausage and roast on plant-based labels even with qualifiers such as vegan or plant-based, at up to $1,000 per label. Arkansas had claimed shoppers might confuse a Tofurky veggie burger with animal meat but presented no evidence of actual confusion.
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Aug 28, 2018
Missouri became the first US state to restrict the word meat to animal products, with criminal penalties of up to a year in prison and a $1,000 fine. Tofurky, the Good Food Institute, the ACLU of Missouri and the Animal Legal Defense Fund had filed a federal First Amendment challenge on August 27, the day before the law took effect.
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Jun 14, 2017
The EU Court of Justice ruled in the TofuTown case (C-422/16) that purely plant-based products cannot, in principle, be marketed with designations such as milk, cream, butter, cheese or yoghurt, which EU law reserves for animal products, even with clarifying words like tofu butter. Soya and tofu products are not on the short exception list, so plant-based dairy in Europe has sold as drink and spread ever since.
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