It is Memorial Day, and a lot of beef is going on grills this weekend. Pick up a package at the store and the label tells you the cut, the weight, the price and perhaps a grade. What it usually does not tell you is where the animal was born and raised. That is not an oversight by the store. It is the state of the law, and the law has been moving.
This post lays out where country of origin labeling (COOL) stands in May 2025: what is still required, how beef and pork fell out of the rule, what the new Product of USA standard changes on January 1, 2026, which bill in the Senate would bring mandatory labeling back, and what all of it means for a grass-fed producer selling into a market full of imported beef.
What COOL still requires
COOL is a retail labeling law run by USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service. It requires grocery stores, supermarkets and club warehouses to tell shoppers the source of certain foods. Today's list covers muscle cuts and ground meat from lamb, goat and chicken; wild and farm-raised fish and shellfish; fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables; peanuts, pecans and macadamia nuts; and ginseng. The rule for all of those commodities took effect on March 16, 2009.
Beef and pork are missing from the list. They were on it from 2009 until the end of 2015, and the story of how they left explains why nobody expects them to come back quietly.
How beef and pork fell out of the law
Mandatory COOL was written into the 2002 farm bill, delayed twice by appropriations riders, and finally put into force by the 2008 farm bill, which also added chicken, goat, pecans, macadamia nuts and ginseng, as the Congressional Research Service history of the dispute lays out. The 2009 rule let a package say "Product of the United States" only for animals born, raised and slaughtered here. A 2013 revision went further and required each production step to be named on the label.
Canada and Mexico, which ship cattle and hogs into US feedlots and packing plants, took the rule to the World Trade Organization. The WTO record of the Canadian case runs from a request for consultations on December 1, 2008 through a panel, an appeal, a compliance panel and a second appeal. The core finding held up at every stage: the labeling rule treated imported livestock less favorably than domestic livestock because of the segregation and record-keeping it imposed on packers.
The end came in December 2015. On December 7, a WTO arbitrator set the annual damage at CAD 1,054.729 million for Canada and, in the parallel Mexican case, USD 227.758 million for Mexico, and on December 21 the WTO authorized both countries to suspend concessions up to those amounts. Congress did not wait for the tariffs. Section 759 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016, signed on December 18, 2015, struck beef, pork, ground beef and ground pork from the statute. The repeal took effect with the signature, and USDA removed the beef and pork provisions from the regulations on March 2, 2016, waiving the usual delay because the statute had already changed.
That is the legal position today for beef and pork: no federal requirement that a retail package say where the animal came from. We made the case for bringing American meat supply back home in 2020. A truthful label is one of the tools, and for nearly ten years it has been missing.
The Product of USA loophole
Something odd grew in the gap. FSIS, the USDA agency that inspects meat and approves labels, had a long-standing entry in its labeling policy book that allowed "Product of USA" on any meat that was processed in a US plant. Meat from cattle born, raised and slaughtered in another country could carry the claim if it was cut, ground or repackaged here. Imported meat has to arrive in a container marked with its country of origin, but the moment it is repackaged in an FSIS-inspected facility it is treated as domestic product for labeling purposes. FSIS says exactly this in its 2024 final rule.
The grass-fed sector was the first to push back. In June 2018 the Organization for Competitive Markets and the American Grassfed Association petitioned FSIS to restrict the claim; the United States Cattlemen's Association followed in October 2019, and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association filed its own petition. A 2021 executive order on competition asked USDA to act. FSIS commissioned a consumer survey and found that most shoppers believe "Product of USA" means an animal born, raised, slaughtered and processed in the United States. The old policy did not deliver that.
What changes on January 1, 2026
The final rule was published on March 18, 2024 and took effect on May 17, 2024, but plants that use the claim have until the next uniform labeling compliance date, January 1, 2026, to change their labels. From that day:
- "Product of USA" and "Made in the USA" may appear on a single-ingredient meat, poultry or egg product only if it comes from animals born, raised, slaughtered and processed in the United States.
- On a multi-ingredient product, every FSIS-regulated ingredient must meet that test, all other ingredients except spices and flavorings must be domestic, and the preparation must happen here.
- Other origin claims are allowed if they say exactly which steps happened here. The rule's own example is "Sliced and packaged in the United States using imported pork."
- A state or local claim has to meet the same test inside that state. The rule's own example is "Product of Montana," which may appear only on meat from an animal born, raised, slaughtered and processed in Montana.
- Any plant using a claim must keep records that FSIS can inspect. The rule's examples are a written description of the plant's sourcing controls, a description of how it traces and segregates qualifying animals, or a signed and dated statement of how the product is prepared.
The rule is voluntary. Nobody has to say anything about origin, and the National Agricultural Law Center's summary notes that Canada and Mexico objected anyway. What the rule does is make a US-origin claim mean what shoppers already think it means.
The bill that would bring COOL back
On February 5, 2025, Senator John Thune introduced the American Beef Labeling Act of 2025, S. 421, with Senators Booker, Rounds, Heinrich, Lummis, Fetterman and Hoeven as original cosponsors. It is a short bill. It puts beef and ground beef back into the COOL statute and then gives the US Trade Representative 180 days to work out a means of reinstating mandatory labeling that complies with WTO rules, and a year to implement it. If no plan is published, the labeling requirement takes effect anyway one year after enactment.
That last clause is the bill's teeth and its risk. The WTO authorizations from 2015 are the reason beef left the statute, and the text does not say how a new rule would avoid the same finding. As of this writing the bill sits in the Senate Agriculture Committee, where it was referred on the day it was introduced.
What the House passed last week, and what it left out
On Thursday, May 22, the House passed H.R. 1, the budget reconciliation bill, by 215 votes to 214. Its agriculture title reads like a chunk of a farm bill. University of Illinois economists at farmdoc daily have walked through the provisions: higher reference prices for every covered commodity starting with the 2025 crop, a higher ARC trigger, bigger crop insurance subsidies, up to 30 million new base acres, and a shift of SNAP costs to the states. Their reading of the CBO score puts the farm assistance increase at $56.4 billion over ten years, paid for by a net $294.7 billion cut to food assistance.
Country of origin labeling is not on that list, and it was never going to be. Reconciliation is a spending vehicle, and a labeling rule does not score. The bill now goes to the Senate, where it can change a great deal. For a cattle producer the lesson is the one we drew in our farm bill explainer: the money provisions move on one track and the market-structure provisions on another, and the second track is slower.
What a grass-fed producer gains
Start with the market. USDA's Economic Research Service describes the United States as the world's largest beef producer and consumer and its second-largest importer, with most imports going into ground beef. The US herd stood at 86.7 million head on January 1, 2025, down 8 percent from the 2019 peak, so imported lean beef is filling a real gap.
Under the old policy, imported beef could reach the shelf as "Product of USA" after a pass through a domestic plant, standing next to a package from a ranch in Missouri at a similar price. After January 1, 2026, it cannot. The premium a shopper pays for a US-origin claim will go to animals that actually lived here. FSIS' own economic analysis adds a useful number: in its ground beef data, claims such as organic, grass-fed, pasture-raised and no antibiotics carried premiums of $0.66 to $0.83 a pound, more than an origin claim alone. Stack an honest origin claim on top of an honest grass-fed claim and the difference between you and an imported competitor is finally visible at the meat case.
There is a second, quieter gain. The documentation the rule requires is the same paperwork a direct-market grass-fed operation already keeps: where the calves came from, where they grazed, who harvested them. If you sell halves and quarters or run your own brand through a small plant, you are closer to compliance than a commodity packer is. Our guide to setting up a grass-fed beef farm and the post on what grass-fed and pasture-raised labels actually mean cover the records worth keeping from day one.
What a grass-fed producer loses, or should watch
The rule is voluntary, so imported beef does not have to say "Imported." It can simply say nothing, or carry a processing claim in small type. A shopper who does not read closely will still see two packages of ground beef and no obvious reason to prefer yours. The burden of telling the story stays with you.
Producers who buy Mexican or Canadian feeder calves and finish them on US grass lose the claim entirely. Born elsewhere means no "Product of USA," no matter how many months the animal spent on your pasture. If that describes part of your supply, segregate those lots now and plan a qualified claim for them.
The grass-fed claim itself has no federal standard behind it. AMS withdrew its grass-fed marketing standard on January 12, 2016, and today the words are approved by FSIS label by label, case by case, under its guideline on animal-raising claims, updated in September 2024. A rigorous origin claim next to a loose grass-fed claim is only half a label. Third-party programs, compared in our post on regenerative certifications, fill that gap for now.
And remember the retaliation. If Congress passes a mandatory beef label without a WTO-proof design, the countries that won in 2015 have a ruling, an arbitration award and a December 2015 authorization to point to, and they would be back in Geneva quickly. The 2015 fight is why senators from both parties wrote S. 421 the cautious way they did. Our note on checkoff programs describes the split between the big trade associations and the independent producer groups, and that split runs through this debate too.
What to do before January 1, 2026
Nothing here requires you to act, but a producer who sells under a brand has about seven months to get ahead of it.
- Decide which claim you can honestly make: "Product of USA," a state claim, or a processing claim. Write it down with the evidence behind it.
- Trace every animal in your program to its birth. If any were born across a border, separate them in your records and on your labels.
- Talk to your processor. The plant is the regulated entity, and it will need your records on file before it prints the label. Small plants are stretched, as our post on the processing bottleneck describes, so give them time.
- Put the origin story on your own materials now: the farm stand board, the website, the bundle sheet. The law catches up in January; your customers can know today.
- Follow S. 421 and the Senate version of H.R. 1 through the summer, and tell your senators what the label means to your business. The producer groups in our directory of organizations sit on both sides of this debate and will have alerts out.
The deepest reason to care is not the premium. A label is a promise, and a farm that keeps its promises in plain sight is doing what we mean by being consistent. Buying from a farm you can name is what we mean by acting local. The law is finally asking the meat case to do the same.