Kamala Harris Set to Propose a Ban on ‘Price Gouging’ for Food and Groceries

Vice President Kamala Harris says she’s proposing a federal ban on “corporate price-gouging in the food and grocery industries.” 

In a statement provided to media outlets, the Harris campaign stated that while “price fluctuations are normal in free markets, there’s a big difference between fair pricing in competitive markets, and excessive prices unrelated to the costs of doing business … Americans can see that difference in their grocery bills.”

According to CNBC, the proposed ban is part of Harris’ larger economic policy platform, which she plans to share with the world on Friday during her campaign rally in North Carolina. According to the statement, Harris says she aims to enact the ban within the first 100 days of taking office if she wins the election and would direct the Federal Trade Commission to impose “harsh penalties” on those who break the yet-to-be-announced limits of “price gouging,” the Washington Post reported. 

As TIME additionally reported, Harris specifically plans to call out the American meat industry and meat processors as “particularly egregious” price fixers. The statement from her campaign read in part, “Soaring meat prices have accounted for a large part of Americans’ higher grocery bills, even as meat processing companies registered record-breaking profits following the pandemic.”

The proposed policy would also see officials more carefully scrutinize large food company mergers — likely including those like the Mars acquisition of ​​Kellanova — and whether those mergers would result in higher prices for consumers. 

The proposed ban appears to be in line with the Biden administration’s current thinking, including its recently launched Strike Force on Unfair and Illegal Pricing. And, as Food & Wine reported in February, President Biden also publicly called out companies for “Shrinkflation,” or making their products smaller and lighter without reducing prices. 

“Sports drink bottles are smaller, a bag of chips has fewer chips, but they’re still charging just as much,” Biden said at the time, “And as an ice cream lover, what makes me the most angry is that ice cream cartons have actually shrunk in size but not in price.” He added, “I’ve had enough of what they call shrinkflation. It’s a rip-off.”

And this isn’t just Biden’s opinion. A 2023 report published by Pennsylvania’s Sen. Bob Casey showed that brands like General Mills decreased the size of its “Family Size” offering across multiple products without reducing cost — products like its Family Size Cocoa Puffs, which shrunk from 19.3 ounces to 18.1 ounces without reducing cost. The same goes for Frito-Lay, which reduced the size of a bag of Doritos from 9.75 ounces to 9.25 ounces. 

Now, we just have to wait until Harris’ speech to learn all the details of the plan.