HB2651 – Addresses food waste by standardizing labels for food’s freshness or expiration.
Prime Sponsor – Representative Doglio (D; 22nd District; Thurston County)
Current status – Had a hearing in the House Committee on Rural Development, Agriculture, & Natural Resources January 24th.
Next step would be – Action by the committee.
Legislative tracking page for the bill.

Summary –
If labels on food for sale in intrastate commerce after January 1, 2022 to use a quality date or a safety date, the bill requires using the phrases “best if used by” or “best if used or frozen by”  to indicate the quality date; and the  phrases “use by” or “use by or freeze by” to indicate the safety date. (Labels could also say that the food was best used or consumed within a specified number of days of being opened; or indicate the date on which it was packed or packaged.) The bill prohibits using a sell by date or the phrases “pull by” or “pull date”, but perishable packed food with a shelf life of less than thirty days would still be required to indicate a pull date with a month and day.

The enforcement of the rules must be based primarily on complaints filed with the Department of Health or a local health jurisdiction with delegated enforcement authority. (The Department could create a webpage or a hotline for handling complaints, but would not have to investigate each one or handle them in a specified length of time.  The penalty for a violation is limited to $500, but each day on which a non-compliant item is sold counts as a violation.

The bill requires retail spaces over 10,000 sq. ft. that sell food to display at least three signs with specified text to educate consumers about the labeling system.

HB2696 – Prohibits labeling or advertising for plant-based alternatives from containing any terms for foods containing meat, including “meat”, “burger”, “sausage”, etc.
Prime Sponsor – Representative Dent (R, 13th District, Moses Lake) (Co-Sponsors Blake, McCaslin, Callan, Eslick, Springer, Griffey, Boehnke, Maycumber, Dye, Chandler, Kretz, and  Schmick)
Current status – Had a hearing in the House Committee on Rural Development, Agriculture, & Natural Resources January 29th. Substitute passed out of committee February 5th; referred to Rules February 10th. Failed to pass out of the House by cutoff.
Next step would be – Dead bill.
Legislative tracking page for the bill.
SB6329 is a companion bill in the Senate.

Comments – If you’re interested in the potential disruption of the current meat and dairy industry by precision fermented proteins like the heme in Impossible Burgers, you might read  Tony Seba’s “Rethinking Food and Agriculture.”

The substitute shifts from requiring the phrase, “this product does not contain meat”, to requiring at least one of several possible words or phrases that indicate that the product does not contain meat, like “plant-based,” “veggie,” or “meat-free.”

Summary –
The bill prohibits using “identifiable meat terms” in labeling or advertising food that doesn’t contain meat, unless there’s a disclaimer in the same type immediately after the term saying, “This product does not contain meat,” or the term is preceded by “imitation” in the same type, like “imitation burger.”

Using the terms without the disclaimers would qualify as misbranding and presumably subject one to legal penalties, though I don’t know what those are.