The Texas Legislature only meets for five months every-other year in a regular session to update our state’s laws. And whether or not the Texas Legislature is in session, we are constantly working at the federal, state, and local levels to promote and protect all foodservice businesses.
Learn more about our recent advocacy wins below, including victories from our two most recent legislative sessions, 2023 and 2021. During these critical post-COVID years, we worked together to achieve some of our industry’s best advocacy wins to date.
2025 Texas Legislative Session
By the numbers:
- The TRA played a major role:
- Blocking 55 bills that would have harmed foodservice businesses
- Passing 18 priority bills to strengthen restaurants and their workforce
- Rewriting 8 bills to protect the foodservice industry
- The TRA also elevated industry voices:
- Testifying at the Texas Capitol over 25 times
- Sending over 3,200 emails to Gov. Abbott and lawmakers
Some of our wins include:
- Passing SB 1008, Consistent Restaurant Regulations—our signature bill of the session with eight different reforms to save foodservice businesses time and money.
- Ensuring new labeling requirements for additives, dyes, and other ingredients do NOT apply to restaurant food (including to-go and catering orders).
- Protecting the tip credit and how restaurants pay out tips.
- Fixing legislation so that restaurants do NOT need to update their menus and marketing materials so listed prices include all fees and taxes.
- Blocking legislation that would have required restaurants to update menus every time food products come from out of state.
- Creating a free, online resource hub to help businesses connect their employees with childcare supports.
- Passing significant property tax reforms to save local businesses time and money.
Learn more:
2023 Texas Legislative Session
By the numbers:
- The TRA worked in a bipartisan, collaborative way to deliver 70 wins in 70 days.
- We tracked 1,143 bills.
- We sent 2,889+ emails to lawmakers on TRA priorities.
- We testified before a legislative committee 22 times.
- And most importantly, we had a 100% success rate blocking harmful legislation.
Some of our wins include:
- Creating regulatory consistency for economic issues like labor, natural resources, property rights, and finance.
- Repealing duplicative permit fees.
- Prohibiting local governments from mandating predictive scheduling or other terms of employment.
- Blocking straw bans and other packaging and utensil restrictions.
- Leading the business sector to address childcare access and affordability.
- Driving new funding for community colleges that graduate students with meaningful credentials.
- Authorizing restaurants to purchase wine that is at least 20 years old directly from wine collection sellers.
- Stopping legislation requiring restaurant employees to take opioid overdose response training.
- Defending the tip credit, valid tip pools, and right to work protections.
- Ensuring online privacy laws do not block restaurant websites, loyalty programs, third-party reservation and delivery platforms, or franchise agreements.
Learn more:
2021 Texas Legislative Session
By the numbers:
- 19 bills passed, including 75% of our priority bills
- 100% success rate blocking TRA-opposed bills
- 865 bills tracked
- 3,289 emails sent from TRA's grassroots network to lawmakers
Some of our wins include:
- Passing 6 of 8 priority bills, allowing restaurants to:
- Permanently sell alcohol to-go,
- Keep franchise tax deductions on federal relief dollars,
- Protect themselves in the third-party delivery market,
- Continue to sell bulk foods and meal boxes,
- Prevent frivolous pandemic lawsuits, and
- Avoid unemployment insurance tax hikes.
- In a special legislative session, we added a 7th priority item to the wins column by securing financial relief for the sector:
- $7.2 billion for the unemployment insurance trust fund, preventing significant tax hikes on restaurants and other businesses
- $180 million in grants for hospitality and tourism businesses that were injured by the pandemic.
Additional Wins During the Covid-19 Pandemic
Working with our lawmakers, regulators, members, and allied partners, the Texas Restaurant Association created critical lifelines to support the industry’s recovery from the economic devastation created by COVID-19. Together, we:
- Assembled a task force of key chain and independent restaurant and bar owners and created the Texas Restaurant Promise and the Texas Bar Promise, which were both used to develop the governor’s minimum standard health protocols that enabled businesses to reopen under one set of statewide rules. Because of this work, Texas food and beverage businesses opened and increased their capacity months before businesses in other states.
- Partnered with Congressman Roy (R-TX) and Congressman Phillips (D-MN) to draft and pass the Paycheck Protection Program Flexibility Act, extending a critical lifeline to all PPP recipients.
- Secured the ability for restaurants to sell alcohol to-go, creating an important new revenue stream to sustain restaurants with closed dining rooms.
- Successfully lobbied alcohol stakeholders and the governor’s office to expand the alcohol to-go waiver to include cocktails mixed onsite.
- Established the TX Restaurant Relief Fund—raising and distributing more than $3.5M to support over 800 independent restaurants and their employees.
- Partnered with TABC to reopen restaurants that were misclassified under the restaurant COVID-19 safety protocols.
- Secured the ability for restaurants to sell bulk retail items—opening the supply chain and ensuring Texans had access to food while creating a new revenue stream for restaurants.
- Secured the ability for restaurants to sell their pre-made meals in grocery stores, again, opening a new revenue channel.
- Partnered with the state to create CARE packages—meals purchased from local restaurants to feed those most in need.
- Fed over 100,000+ first responders through special initiatives with BCBSTX, Exxon Mobil, Chipotle, Whataburger, and independent restaurants across Texas.
- Partnered with the Texas Workforce Commission, Dallas College, and A Closer Look to build and launch the first training, certification, and validation program for restaurants operating in the COVID-19 world—The Texas Restaurant Promise Certification. Provided this program for free to hundreds of restaurants.
- Partnered with TABC to expedite parklet permits and to change two-year fees into one-year fees, helping with cash flow.
- Worked with local officials to keep restaurants open and encourage dining out safely.
Earlier Wins
Long before the COVID-19 pandemic hit Texas, the TRA had a legacy of promoting and protecting the foodservice industry. Previous wins include:
- 2019: Passed legislation to allow restaurants with a mixed beverage permit to deliver alcoholic beverages in their manufacturer-sealed containers to consumers as part of a food order.
- 2019: Passed legislation to establish a brand-new oyster farming industry in Texas.
- 2019: Passed legislation strengthening and clarifying the bill that the TRA championed in 2017 to exempt restaurants from weight and scale regulations.
- 2017: Passed legislation to increase the alcohol sales threshold for mixed beverage permittees from 50% to 60% of total sales, provide a more uniform calculation by the TABC, and provide due process rights to permittees.
- 2017: Passed legislation to exempt places that serve food for immediate consumption from the Texas Department of Agriculture’s requirement that an establishment maintain a certified scale with a visible consumer protection sticker.
- 2017: Passed legislation to eliminate all local food handler fees and documentation requirements for all food service employees who successfully pass an ANSI accredited or state registered food handler course.
- 2015: Passed legislation to lower unemployment insurance taxes for restaurant franchises.
- 2013: Passed legislation allowing beer and wine permits in areas that are designated as wet for mixed beverages.
- 2013: Passed legislation cutting in half the mixed beverage tax that restaurants and bars are required to pay