Topping Turmoil: Big Pizza Company Fights ObamaCare Menu Mandate

The pizza lobby is mounting a double-extra-large battle against looming government regulations that would force their franchises to post a dizzying array of calorie counts on their menus.

Under ObamaCare, a Food and Drug Administration rule would require restaurants and food retail shops with over 20 locations, like pizza delivery chains, to post in-store menus displaying nutritional information.

Pizza chains argue this would be particularly tough for them, and take extraordinarily large menu boards. Domino’s Pizza claims it offers 34 million different pie combinations; Pizza Hut boasted last year it can make 2 billion different pizzas. While the FDA has suggested restaurants can institute calorie “ranges” for each pizza, one Domino’s franchise owner in Missouri guessed it would cost him $5,000 to build the boards — though over 90 percent of Domino’s business comes in over the phone or online, and so most customers never see the in-store board.

“You can’t possibly fit all the iterations of pizza on a typical menu board like you can for burgers, for example,” Lynn Liddle, executive vice president of communications for Domino’s, said in testimony before Congress in June. According to this Domino’s video, menu boards are used in less than 1.5 percent of their total orders each day. She told FoxNews.com Thursday that Domino’s has been providing nutritional information voluntarily online for 10 years.

“I think what we’re doing is the right thing for our consumers and for the small business owners, so they do not have to pay for a big static menu board that won’t help the consumer anyway,” said Liddle, who also represents the American Pizza Community — a consortium including Pizza Hut, Little Caesars and Papa John’s now lobbying to relax the rules under proposed legislation. (Read more from “Topping Turmoil: Big Pizza Company Fights ObamaCare Menu Mandate” HERE)

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