With a new year comes a relatively blank slate for lawmakers and regulators at all levels of government. Officials are already scrambling to chalk it full of initiatives with implications for the restaurant industry, good and bad. While more states consider establishing cocktails to-go as a permanent option for operators, for instance, considerable interest is also turning to novel matters for the business, such as who should pay for increased trash from the off-premise boom.
Here’s a look at what government issues the industry may face in 2022.
Who pays for recycling all those used to-go containers?
After being largely back-burnered by the pandemic in 2020 and 21, environmental initiatives are expected to regain momentum this year, particularly in regard to disposable food packaging. The renewed emphasis is likely to introduce the industry to a potentially worrisome phrase: extended producer responsibility, or EPR.
That’s the name of a movement aiming to shift the cost of dealing with used food packaging from municipalities and states to the businesses that profit from the disposables. Proponents say packaging manufacturers and such users as restaurants have no incentive to cut their contributions to the waste stream as long as the public picks up the cost of gathering and disposing of the containers. Making them pay for the cleanup provides a strong incentive to explore more environmentally friendly alternatives. Plus, the expense to taxpayers is considerable.
A proposal to develop an EPR system in New York, the nation’s fourth largest restaurant market, was included in Gov. Kathy Hochul’s State of the State address last week. As her office noted in the governor’s 237-page legislative and regulatory plan for 2022, the changeover amounts to “a fundamental shift in the way recyclable materials are thought of, produced, and managed.”
If the governor is successful in shepherding EPR legislation into law, New York would become the third state to mandate the switch. Maine and Oregon pushed through measures last summer. All of the initiatives legislate an aim, but little has been revealed about how much manufacturers or users might be charged.
Reusable to-go food containers
Maine can lay claim to being the nation’s R&D lab for packaging measures. It was not only the first state to legislate a switch to EPR, but also broke new ground last fall by clearing the way for restaurants to reuse to-go food containers. Although California already had a law on the books that permitted restaurant customers to bring back cups and certain other containers for refills, Maine’s measure went considerably further by focusing on food packaging as much as coffee cups and other beverage holders.
The question is, will states, counties and municipalities follow the lead of those progressive states?
In any case, subsequent measures are unlikely to be plug-and-play initiatives. Maine is still grappling with the particulars of its plan, which limits reuse to containers specifically produced for multiple fillings. The packaging also has to be cleaned, sanitized and inspected by an employee before it can be used subsequent times.
Eased rules on alcohol sales
Gov. Hochul drew praise and thanks from her state’s restaurant industry by stressing in her State of the State address that she intends to permit restaurants to again sell alcoholic beverages to go, a privilege extended to them during roughly the first 16 months of the pandemic. Operators in about 15 other states are now waiting to see if their governors or lawmakers similarly make that crisis stopgap a permanent option for restaurants offering food to go.
Those are the jurisdictions that temporarily greenlighted the sale of alcohol for off-premise consumption when dining rooms were shut down because of coronavirus. All told, more than 30 states currently permit restaurants to provide alcoholic beverages to go, according to the National Restaurant Association’s Mike Whatley, VP of state affairs and grassroots advocacy. States that initially embraced that service as a form of emergency relief may come around to instituting it permanently, he suggested on this week's Working Lunch, the RB podcast produced by government-affairs specialists Joe Kefauver and Franklin Coley of Align Public Strategies.
In addition, “There are a few states that don’t have cocktails to go that are now talking about it,” Whatley said.
Unconventional labor remedies
The industry’s labor shortage has metastasized to the whole business community, forcing government leaders to address the shrinking workforce as a pressing macro-economic and social issue. Fortunately for restaurants, which have cycled through a host of recruitment and retention tactics, some jurisdictions are looking at some of the major underlying causes of the shortage in their area.
Vermont, for instance, is looking at a systematic approach to reversing the exodus of would-be employees from all 14 of its counties. Gov. Phil Scott cited the cultivation of a more robust workforce as one of his top priorities. “It is going to take all of us committing to this goal and pulling in the same direction,” he said in his State of the State address.
Among the moves he vowed to undertake was bringing down the cost of living so more working people would remain in the state. In particular, he promised to look at ways of reducing the high soaring cost of housing.
Among the remedies he cited with direct implications for the restaurant industry were efforts to promote more trades education and steering more youngsters into apprenticeships.
New York’s Hochul also promised to make housing more affordable and promote apprenticeship programs in her state. She also mentioned a need to bring inexpensive mass transit to “train deserts” where workers have few transportation options.
She also outlined an initiative to help ex-offenders find jobs after their release from prison. New York has the seventh highest number of incarcerated persons among all 50 states, with about 43,500 inmates. That’s more than the total number of restaurant and bar jobs that were filled nationwide in December.
For more insights into what the restaurants can expect from local and state lawmakers this year, check out the preview from Align Public Strategies and podcast guest Mike Whatley.