Comment - 22009 - Struggling Retailer

To the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment: My name is Craig and I operate Monsieur Marcel, a French gourmet market and bistro concept in Los Angeles. We carry curated specialty foods, about 10,000 SKU, many of them imported and impossible to source anywhere else. I am writing to comment on several of the Omnibus 2026 proposals because they affect small food retailers like us directly and in ways I do not think are always visible from Sacramento. I want to start with a real situation, because it is the reason I am taking the time to write. One of our key suppliers has decided to stop selling to California businesses altogether. The reason is Proposition 65. The burden of compliance and the constant threat of private enforcer litigation made California not worth the trouble for them. When a supplier makes that choice, we lose products we cannot replace, and our customers lose access to foods they cannot find elsewhere. This is the quiet cost of the current system. It does not protect anyone. It just removes good products from California shelves. I ask you to keep that outcome in mind as you weigh these changes. Let me be concrete about the cost, because the abstract word "burden" does not capture it. Defending or settling a single Prop 65 claim runs into the tens of thousands of dollars, and in our case the exposure is approaching fifty thousand dollars. That is not a fine that funds public health. It is money that funds the private law firms who have turned this statute into a business model, profiting off the backs of businesses like mine. And the fees are only part of it. There is also the labor. The hours my team and I spend sourcing signage, verifying language, documenting placement, chasing testing data, and managing the whole apparatus of compliance is a real and recurring cost, and every one of those hours exists only to mitigate what has become a government sanctioned racket. None of that time goes into making better food or serving a single customer. I understand this office does not control the private enforcement mechanism. That lives in the statute, and I am not asking you to rewrite it. But I need you to hear this plainly, because it is the honest truth of where I am. I am afraid of what is coming if this law does not change. I run a small business, not a corporation with a legal department. One aggressive settlement demand at the wrong moment is the kind of thing that ends a company like mine. That fear is the reason I am spending my morning on this instead of running my stores. And it is the reason every one of the changes in front of you matters more than it might appear on paper. When you make a warning method simpler or an exemption clearer, you are not tidying language. You are deciding whether a small business can afford to keep going. With that context, here are my comments on the specific topics. Topic 4: Naturally occurring chemicals (Section 25501). I support this clarification. Much of what triggers warnings on imported specialty foods is not something anyone added. It is trace metals that the food absorbed from the natural world. Cadmium in wild fish comes from the ocean. Lead in olives comes from soil minerals through ordinary geologic processes. These are not contaminants a producer chose to introduce. Clarifying that chemicals absorbed or accumulated from the natural environment in which a food is raised, grown, or obtained are naturally occurring is correct and overdue. My one request is that you keep this exemption practically usable for small retailers. In practice the data needed to prove natural background levels sits with the producer overseas, not with a small market in Los Angeles. If the clarification is written so that only large importers with laboratories can ever rely on it, it will not help the businesses that need it most. Please make clear that a retailer may reasonably rely on documentation and testing provided by the producer or supplier. Topic 7: QR codes as a warning method (Sections 25601 and 25602). I strongly support this. This is a genuinely helpful, modern idea. Many of our products are small. A tin of fish or a jar of olives has almost no room for a full warning once you account for the existing label. Allowing a short statement plus a QR code that links to the full warning solves a real problem. It lets us give consumers complete information without covering the product in warning text, and it lets us keep the linked warning accurate and current without reprinting labels every time something changes. I encourage you to adopt this and to keep the accompanying statement short and simple. Topic 5: Internet purchase warnings (Sections 25600.2 and 25602). I ask you to reconsider the added burden here. As I read the proposal, an online seller would now have to provide both a warning method on the product itself and a warning on the website. For a small food retailer this effectively means we must physically label every single item we ship, in addition to posting the warning online where the customer already sees it before buying. I do not understand what this second requirement accomplishes. The purpose of a warning is to inform the consumer before the exposure decision. Online, that decision happens on the website, and the website warning already does that job clearly. Requiring a physical label on top of it does not add information the customer will see any earlier. It just adds cost and labor, and it falls hardest on small businesses that hand pack their own orders. My request is that for food sold online, a clear and conspicuous warning provided on the website before purchase should be sufficient on its own. If a physical component must remain, please allow flexible methods such as a warning included with the shipment rather than a printed label affixed to each product. Topic 2: Aligning the short form descriptor (Sections 25603 and 25607.2). I support this. Consistency between the short form and full length warning language is sensible and reduces confusion for businesses trying to get the wording right. I have no objection. Closing I am not asking you to weaken protections for consumers. I am asking you to make compliance workable for the small, independent businesses that make California's food landscape interesting. The naturally occurring clarification and the QR code option are real improvements and I thank you for them. The internet provision, as drafted, would add cost without adding meaningful protection, and I hope you will refine it. But I will be honest with you about the bigger picture. These fixes help at the margins, and I am grateful for them, but the thing that keeps me up at night is not any single warning method. It is the enforcement system sitting behind all of it, and the knowledge that no amount of careful compliance fully protects a small business from it. I am telling you I am scared of what comes next. Every improvement you can make to the parts you control buys businesses like mine a little more room to survive, and right now we need all of it. I am happy to serve as a resource on how these rules land for a small specialty food business. Thank you for the opportunity to comment. Craig Gladstone Monsieur Marcel Gourmet Market and Bistro, Los Angeles