Two Colorado Democrats have introduced a bill that would prohibit restaurants and delivery services from including napkins, utensils, condiment packets, and cup sleeves in your order unless you specifically ask for them. Violations could cost businesses up to $1,000.
SB26-146, introduced on March 24 by State Sen. Lisa Cutter and State Rep. Meg Froelich, would ban any "retail food establishment or third-party food delivery service from providing single-use food serviceware to a customer" unless the customer requested it or confirmed they wanted it. If passed, the law would take effect at the start of 2027.
The bill's justification is that consumers "are increasingly frustrated with the amount of single-use items they receive with food-service orders." Whether anyone has ever marched on a state capitol over an unwanted ketchup packet remains unclear.
According to The Daily Caller, the bill targets a specific list of condiments that cannot be provided without a customer's explicit request: "ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, creamer, butter, soy sauce, hot sauce, salsa, syrup, jam, jelly, sugar, salt, pepper, sweetener, or chili pepper."
Former Colorado Republican Party Chair Kristi Burton Brown, now executive vice president of the conservative think tank Advance Colorado Institute, tore into the legislation on X on March 28. She branded it the "NAPKIN BAN" and laid out how the law would play out in practice:
"If this passes, your local Taco Bell can be fined up to $1,000 for giving you a napkin with your order if you didn't request it."
Burton Brown also highlighted the bill's arbitrary distinctions between which condiments make the banned list and which don't. Taco Bell gets penalized for including hot sauce packets. Pho restaurants face no penalty for providing hoisin sauce. Arby's sauce is also in the clear, but your local coffee shop's creamer or sweetener triggers the fine.
"The bill sponsors chose to make a list of which condiments can't be given out without being requested, and they clearly don't frequent certain types of restaurants."
The selective enforcement practically writes the criticism itself. Legislators sat down, reviewed the universe of condiments, and decided that some sauces are environmentally acceptable while others are a menace. The reasoning behind these distinctions is left as an exercise for the reader.
The legislation doesn't stop at napkins and ketchup. Burton Brown pointed out that it would also ban cup sleeves on hot coffee unless the customer asks for one. Her summary was blunt:
"So feel free to burn your hands in the name of saving the planet."
Third-party delivery services like DoorDash face their own liability trap. If a delivery platform fails to clearly communicate a customer's utensil and condiment preferences to the restaurant, and the restaurant packs a single unwanted napkin, both the platform and the restaurant can be fined. Burton Brown called it "socialist rule at its finest."
The penalty structure, as described on the Colorado General Assembly website, authorizes counties to impose civil penalties of up to $500 for a second violation and up to $1,000 for a third or subsequent violation. So the first offense is a warning. After that, a fast-food worker who tosses a napkin into a bag out of habit becomes a financial liability.
SB26-146 isn't Colorado Democrats' first venture into regulating what businesses can hand their customers. Sen. Cutter was a sponsor of the Plastic Pollution Reduction Act, passed in 2021, which banned establishments from providing plastic bags. That law claimed that "limiting the use of single-use plastic carryout bags and expanded polystyrene products will mitigate the harmful effects on our state's natural resources and our environment." It went into effect in 2024.
The new bill would expand that same framework. The progression is worth tracking:
Each step sounds modest in isolation. Taken together, they represent a steady ratchet of government control over the smallest details of commercial life. Today it's napkins. Tomorrow it's the bag your napkin used to come in. Eventually, the question isn't what businesses are allowed to give you. It's what they're allowed to do at all without prior approval.
Spokespersons for both Cutter and Froelich did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation's request for comment. A spokesperson for Democratic Gov. Jared Polis did not immediately respond to questions about whether he would sign or veto the bill if it reached his desk.
That silence matters. Democrats hold a 43-22 majority in the Colorado House and a 23-12 majority in the State Senate. If leadership wanted to kill this bill quietly, it could. If the governor found it embarrassing, he could say so. Instead, nothing.
The bill's own text insists that a "statewide requirement for retail food establishments to ask before providing single-use food serviceware, including single-use condiments, will reduce the amount of unwanted items provided to customers, reduce plastic waste, and save food retailers hundreds or thousands of dollars per year." The argument is that the government is doing restaurants a favor by threatening them with fines.
Only in a state legislature could someone argue with a straight face that businesses need the threat of a $1,000 penalty to figure out how to save money on napkins.
This is the regulatory impulse stripped down to its purest form. There is no public health crisis caused by napkins. There is no environmental emergency created by a packet of salt. There is only the belief, held with religious conviction by a certain kind of legislator, that every human interaction is a potential point of government intervention.
The bill claims its targets "are not recyclable or compostable, yet they are commonly placed in recycling and compost streams, becoming contaminants." So the problem isn't that restaurants hand out napkins. The problem is that consumers put them in the wrong bin. The solution, naturally, is to punish the restaurant.
Colorado's small business owners already navigate a thicket of regulations. Now they may need to build compliance systems to track whether a customer verbally confirmed they wanted a fork. A taco shop owner who includes a napkin out of basic courtesy becomes a repeat offender subject to escalating fines.
This is what happens when a legislature has supermajorities and nothing left to regulate. They come for the napkins.
