alt Hacker NewsI mean, that's so vague that it can be said about anything: Some people think X is positive and will buy the product and some people think X is negative and won't buy the product. Pretty obvious.
The purpose of food labels is to increase safety, transparency and honesty around the contents of food. Companies who oppose safety, transparency or honesty and/or produce products with questionable contents will oppose labels and companies who support safety, transparency and honesty will support them. I don't know many end-consumers who oppose labels themselves. But they will oppose products that contain questionable ingredients, so transparency is bad for companies that produce those products.
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The median label is transparent and honest but that's not a guarantee, especially when marketing gets involved. Plenty of companies will make statements that are true but opaque, dishonest, and unrelated to safety. And they'll support any labeling standard that helps them along those lines.
> The purpose of food labels is to increase safety, transparency and honesty around the contents of food.
USDA Organic label is rampant with fraud, and just having thr USDA label on it isn't a guarantee of trust. Similarly, the AHA endorsing oils blatantly bad for the heart is also similar example how labeling doesn't promote trust necessarily. Labels can and do lie, quite often even.
> and companies who support safety, transparency and honesty will support them.
Not quite.
Companies who can use the official labels to back up their own advertising campaigns will support them. (I know people who think that having a label for something is evidence of that thing being good or bad. No, it's evidence that someone thought that expending the effort to convince the government to have that label would have a positive return.)
Companies with more ability to amortize regulatory overhead (relative to their competitors) will support them, because for then that overhead is itself a competitive advantage.