What Does It Mean To Label Coffee As ‘Healthy’?

The FDA now says coffee can officially be labeled “healthy.” But in an industry already rife with dubious health and ethical claims, what does adding a new word to coffee’s lexicon mean?

Photo by Carmela on Unsplash

Please give to the folks in LA if you can: here’s a coffee-specific resource list from Sprudge and a general list from Anne Helen Peterson.

At the end of 2024, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) updated its criteria for the use of “healthy” on food and drink labels. Following this rule change, foods that the FDA once classed as healthy, like protein bars and cereal, were no longer eligible for that label.New foods and drinks were also added to the healthy column, including salmon, eggs—and coffee.

As the agency wrote on December 27, “all water, tea, and coffee with less than 5 calories per RACC [Reference Amount Customarily Consumed, or how much most people consume of an item] and per labeled serving automatically qualify for the ‘healthy’ claim.”

Coffee’s health merits have been subject to debate for decades. Thousands of studies have attempted to come up with a definitive ruling on its benefits or harms—so many that in the newsletter I edit, Coffee News Club (written by friend of this newsletter, The Pourover’s Fionn Pooler), there’s a recurring section dedicated to new studies that make coffee health claims.

While I believe the findings (and try to understand the limitations) of each of these studies, it strikes me that the FDA’s rule change reflects just how much coffee seems to yearn for definition—and how that’s made our understanding of the language used to describe coffee really weird.

Health is only one such fraught example. Brands put a lot of weight on the idea of drinking “morally good” coffee and throw around words like “ethical” and “direct-trade”: words with no governing body, like the FDA, to regulate their use, and which are employed in a way that makes them almost impossible to define. Many coffee brands also resort to other dubious health-related claims, using fearmongering tactics to market “mold-free” coffee or diet fads to promote “bulletproof coffee.”

In short, coffee is already rife with ambiguous and arguably exploitative language meant to influence your drinking habits one way or another. With this new rule change for coffee labeling, will we end up with hundreds of bags of coffee emblazoned with the word “healthy?” Will coffee suddenly be hawked as some sort of health food? And what does it mean for coffee to enter the “good for you” food chat?

What Is Health? What Is Ethical?

In the United States, the word “healthy” is federally regulated. Brands must meet specific nutritional standards before using it in their branding and packaging. And it’s been a while since those requirements have changed: The FDA last set standards around the word in 1994, aiming to highlight “nutrient-dense foods that are encouraged by the Dietary Guidelines – vegetables, fruits, whole grains, fat-free and low-fat dairy, lean game meat, seafood, eggs, beans, peas, lentils, nuts, and seeds – with no added ingredients except for water,” according to a recent press release.

In providing its new definition, the FDA discussed its previous parameters for defining “healthy” food, many of which were focused on fat content. This new update, the FDA wrote, reflects that “dietary guidance have evolved since 1994.”

This all makes sense—our understanding of nutrition, and scientific understanding more generally, is always evolving. I’m not here to debate the merits of the FDA’s updated guidance, or to reflect on its context within our broader society. Indeed, what’s healthy or not is different for different people, and myopic definitions of health are often used to harm people who exist outside of Western beauty standards. Our society fails to prioritize mental health, monetizes healthcare, and regularly denies peoples’ claims for necessary care, all while creating artificial food deserts that prevent low-income people from accessing nutritious foods.

Instead, I’m interested in how these definitions come to be—and if there’s any stake beyond the so-called pursuit of more accurate terminology. A 2023 report from the nonprofit U.S. Right To Know found that “nine of the 20 experts on the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee have had conflicts of interest in the food, beverage, pharmaceutical or weight loss industries in the last five years,” Alice Callahan reported for the New York Times.

The term “healthy,” according to the FDA, was revised in order “to more closely align with nutrition science underpinning the Dietary Guidelines, 2020-2025.” It stands to reason that changes to the definition of “healthy,” and the Dietary Guidelines more generally, could be influenced by those who have a monetary stake in some part of the food industry.

As it continues, the New York Times piece gets pretty specific about the people involved with crafting the new guidelines, and admits that finding objective experts with the knowledge necessary to serve on the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee is difficult. As Callahan writes, “Federal funding for nutrition research is limited ... and many researchers accept industry grants for research studies so they can keep their jobs in academia.”

But even if the people appointed to the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee work to keep their recommendations objective (the New York Times piece includes interviews with several sources who think the board did a pretty good job putting nutritional science first), their recommendations are simply that: recommendations given to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Both agencies can freely choose to ignore or omit the guidance. For example, the 2015 Dietary Guidelines “omitted the committee’s advice on limiting the consumption of red and processed meats after intense lobbying by the meat industry,” Callahan writes.

I can’t say for sure whether there was outside influence on the FDA’s reclassification of “healthy,” but I do know the updated definition was welcomed by the coffee industry. Daily Coffee News reported that the rule change was cheered by the National Coffee Association, one of coffee’s largest trade organizations. (Check out the NCA’s Board of Directors: It’s primarily composed of people from very big coffee organizations.)

In a press release, NCA President William “Bill” Murray said: “As Americans enjoy the holiday season, FDA’s definition of coffee as healthy is all the more reason to celebrate the country’s favorite beverage. Decades of robust, independent scientific evidence show that coffee drinkers live longer, healthier, happier lives, and [the] FDA is absolutely right that including coffee in the definition of ‘healthy’ can help consumers choose beverages that help maintain healthy diets.”

I share all of this context to demonstrate how what we imagine as scientific and objective can be heavily influenced by money and power. Many of the words we use to classify the worth and value of what we consume carry less weight than we might realize.

Still, the word “healthy”—at least within the food-labeling world—is heavily monitored. Even with the influence of lobbyists and moneyed interests, there are hundreds of eyes on this definition. What happens when the words we use to describe or value a product have no such actors trying to protect (or shape) their meaning?

Meaning Without Context

Perhaps my biggest pet peeve as a writer and editor is when someone pitches me a story about an “ethical” coffee shop that uses “fair trade” beans. I often push back when people use these words, because they’re not evidence in themselves but rather conclusions that may or may not have been drawn from real evidence. How do they know the coffee is sourced ethically? What makes this a fair trade shop? Where did this information come from?

Seemingly every industry has a “better for you” segment, which proffers supposedly better versions of that thing you like. But coffee also has a “morally better” segment wrapped up in the ethical intricacies and historical exploitation that are latent in the industry’s structure. By serving as both a consumer good and something we imbibe, coffee opens itself up to myriad attempts to moralize its consumption—resulting in claims that often don’t mean much of anything.

Many of the words I see used by coffee brands, like “ethical” or “direct-trade” or “relationship coffee” (a term I’ve written about in the past), don’t have any intrinsic meaning or official parameters, and can be used freely. Even terms like “Fair Trade” are difficult to pin down: While companies must go through certification processes to label coffee as “Fair Trade” (Fair Trade USA™ is a different certification from Fairtrade International, which adds to the confusion, there remains ambiguity in lowercase “fair trade.”

For example, there’s a spot in Madison, where I live, called Fair Trade Coffee House. It doesn’t seem to be affiliated with any of the certification bodies above.¹

But because such terms can be used freely means they are used freely, and trying to figure out the truth underlying “ethical” or “fair” claims becomes more and more difficult. Transparency is one antidote to this problem: If you’re claiming something is better, having some level of openness about how you came to that conclusion helps. But it’s not a cure-all: Transparency without context doesn’t mean much.

Writing this piece feels like trying to predict the future. I don’t know yet what the impacts of coffee’s new “healthy” label will be. But I’m already picturing marketing campaigns from powerful, multinational coffee companies centered on coffee as a health tool. I can imagine such campaigns making consumers feel better about their consumption habits, all while the brands continue to avoid making meaningful changes in their supply streams to improve farmers’ livelihoods or lessen the impact of climate change.

As part of the announcement, the FDA also said it was working on a symbol brands can use if their products fall under the “healthy” parameters, so I wonder if coffee’s new health halo will simply mean more brands using this symbol. Maybe this definition will lead to brands attempting to create a competitive edge by saying their coffee is better for you than others’.

Whatever happens, we must continue to question how these definitions are made—and all the ways such terminology can be vague, undefinable, and used without scrutiny.

1. It does carry coffee from Equal Exchange, an organization I’d love to learn more about. It also seems to source coffee under a fair-trade model, but I can’t tell if it’s certified under any of the schemes listed above. When I clicked on the coffees available on its web store, most were organic-certified and Kosher Pareve-certified by the Orthodox Union)