> but its still a multi-billion dollar industry
There's 330 million people in the US. Everything the average person spends six dollars a year on is a multi- billion dollar industry.
>Each of the largest companies will have PR agencies, personal contacts within the FDA, revolving door of staff between the FDA and the corporate, positions on standards committees, board members who have spent a life time in food safety governance
Think about how many people someone will work with and befriend over a lifetime. You're pretending that's a high bar when it's a low bar.
>The same complaint from a small company will never get the same attention.
You should go to the NPA's website (linked in TFA, you have exolymph's comment to thank for prompting me to look it up), go to the membership directory and start looking up these pasta companies before you run your mouth. While many of the companies are wholly owned subsidiaries or larger more mainstream food brands but none of them seem to exceed the BLS definition of medium sized. If the FDA enforcement action unfolded the way we are all assuming it is then that would seem to indicate medium-smallish companies do have their legislator's ear (or they just tipped off the FDA directly and then just kept following up until the FDA was annoyed enough to do something).
Edit:
Here's Medallion Foods, Virginia Park foods which seem to be among the biggest (ballpark estimate based on facility sized and value of what's in the parking lot) and one in Montana that I thought was cool because they had the street named after them. All these companies seem to have their office location the same as their manufacturing location so it's kind of hard to get a sense of scale.
https://www.google.com/maps/@47.0889449,-122.3631175,3a,75y,...
https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0173065,-117.3829804,3a,75y,...
https://www.google.com/maps/@47.5168777,-111.2619547,3a,75y,...
> A competitor breached a pointless regulation[1] from the last century which has prevented their product from being sold for a year.
>[1] Many of these food regs are designed to enrich staple foods that were the main source of nutrients for low income families. That's just not an issue anymore and just prevents (high quality) imports.
The last century was 20yr ago. HN would be out for blood if someone was caught importing completely functional catalytic converters or bicycle helmets that didn't meet some irrelevant to performance nuance of the law. HN is sympathetic in this case because the product in question is an upscale-ish pasta. If regulations on some ingredient were being manipulated in a way that was only affecting production of cheap lite beer we'd be reading through several hundred snarky comments about how this is a good thing.