San Francisco city sues world’s largest food manufacturers
January 27, 2026 -The city of San Francisco has sued 11 of the world’s largest food manufacturers for “restitution and penalties”, claiming that the public’s consumption of their ultra-processed products results in cities’ having to bear the “astronomical health care costs associated with UPF consumption”.
San Francisco’s city attorney, David Chiu, has sued 11 transnational corporations on behalf of the State of California, “seeking unspecified damages for the costs that local governments bear for treating residents whose health has been harmed by ultra-processed food”.
The defendants in the case are the global agrifood giants Kraft Heinz, Mondelez, Post, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, Nestlé, Kellanova, Kellogg, Mars, and Conagra.
The case hit the headlines globally, featured in the Guardian, the New York Times, Reuters, the BBC, National Public Radio, and on television networks ABC and PBS, among others.
Ultra-processed foods (UPF) are estimated to make up more than 70% of the United States’ food supply and 60% of the energy children in America consume. In the United Kingdom, UPFs constitute 50% of the average person’s energy intake, and have rapidly risen to 40% of average energy intake in South Africa. These are not foods that are ‘just’ high in unhealthy fats, sugars, and salt – they are products engineered for addiction, many scientists and nutritionists report, containing chemical additives that enhance flavour, colour, and texture, encouraging over-eating and addiction, by overriding the brain’s natural signalling processes that usually let you know that you have eaten enough.
In South Africa…
The University of the Western Cape’s Dr Tamryn Frank told Food Stories that the regulatory context globally is starting to change, in the direction of supporting claims that food products are harming public health.
“If we look at the history of unhealthy commodities,” Frank said, “we see how it was really important that there was regulation of the tobacco industry before things really started to change,” with 183 countries and “integrated economic regions” now having in place stringent restrictions on the marketing of tobacco products.
“I think this is quite an important moment in terms of the UPF industry,” Frank said, “because we are now starting to see that there’s enough evidence of the harms of UPF that there is now space to actually try to litigate against these corporations. There’s been mention about these products being addictive, and it seems like more and more evidence is being produced that is pointing in that direction, which makes a court case more feasible.”
In a commentary for the journal Addiction, Laura Schmidt from the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, refers to the Lancet’s November 2025 review of over 100 observational studies and clinical trials that document “harm to nearly every human organ system, underscoring UPFs as an important 21st-centure vector for chronic disease, as well as to trials that confirm causal links between UPF consumption and overeating (also reported in the Daily Maverick).
Schmidt then describes how for almost half of the 20th century (45 years) tobacco giants Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds owned the largest food companies in the United States (such as Kraft and Nabisco), and “transferred their knowledge of neuroscience, sensory science, chemical additives, product design, and marketing to their UPF subsidiaries”.
Up until 2000, Schmidt writes, “the tobacco industry publicly dismissed all evidence that cigarettes are addictive, even though secretly, companies had been investigating and exploiting the addictive properties of nicotine since the 1960s”.
Schmidt says ‘Big Food’ is doing exactly the same thing: pulling the wool over consumers’ and regulatory authorities’ eyes by disguising or hiding incontrovertible scientific evidence about harms to health from their products, while cynically marketing them to increase sales and profits. (South African researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of the Western Cape have also been trying to draw government’s attention to these issues, notably through the now six-years’-long attempt to get government to increase the sugar tax (Health Promotion Levy) to the level recommended by WHO, which government has refused to do due to sugar-industry lobbying.)
Back in the United States…
The San Francisco lawsuit, as well as Martinez’s earlier one, includes the claim that – as used to be standard practice with cigarette and other tobacco product advertising – the companies are well aware of their products’ damages to health, but market them relentlessly to consumers, including children, in any case.
Martinez’s 2024 lawsuit was the first to make the direct, bald claim that transnational UPF manufacturers are using the same “playbook” in their marketing of unhealthy food and beverage products as “Big Tobacco” (transnational cigarette and other tobacco product companies) used to market their deadly products, for decades, before the World Health Organization in 2003 designed an agreement that some 180 countries have subsequently signed up to, to restrict the marketing of tobacco products, especially to children.
Though Martinez’s claim was dismissed in August 2025 (his lawyers have since filed an ‘amended complaint’, the New York Times reported), and though it may be hard to prove ‘causation’ (that ultra-processed foods in particular are responsible for the health damages the lawsuit is alleging) the lawsuit filed by San Francisco may carry more weight, commentators believe.
The Director of both Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic and Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, Emily M. Broad Leib, told Harvard Law News that the San Francisco case is “unique” because “it’s the first case of its kind filed against ultraprocessed foods manufacturers by government, rather than by private individuals.” Broad explained why this may be a much more powerful lever: “California state law allows for city attorneys — like David Chiu — to bring statewide litigation on behalf of the people of California. This changes the scope of the action from an individual scale to a societal scale.”
The case is based on two specific accusations: first, that the food companies are violating state “unfair competition law”, and second, a charge that they are imposing a “common threat harming the public and forcing governments to expend funds to remedy the damage,” Broad Leib says.
The defendants in the case are exactly the same companies sued by Bryce Martinez in the United States one year before. Martinez, who was just 19 when he sued, was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease at the age of 16, and will live with those chronic conditions for life. Martinez filed a civil complaint in Philadelphia in his personal capacity, suing the companies for deliberately engineering their UPF products to be addictive (and the result of his addiction was his illnesses) and for targeting their marketing to children, we reported in the Daily Maverick.
Though food addiction is not yet included in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), two very large studies in China and the United States “add urgency to calls for international recognition of ultra-processed foods as addictive,” writes Professor Laura Schmidt of the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco.
Even if the case does not succeed in court to indict the food manufacturers on these charges, there are still “several potential benefits to this suit,” Schmidt said, including ongoing raising of public awareness of the health issues associated with UPF, potentially paving the way for other, increasing legal action.
UWC’s Dr Frank emphasized that it is essential the government regulations address the marketing aspect of the UPF manufacturers’ modus operandum. South Africa’s still-pending (since 2023) draft regulations on front-of-package labelling for processed foods contain some restrictions on marketing – but not enough, Frank says, explaining that the most recent marketing-related language in the regulations needs to be “a lot more comprehensive” than that in the draft version.
“One wants to make sure that all forms of marketing of these unhealthy ultra-processed products are covered,” Frank told Food Stories, “not just on TV or radio but also in online platforms, social media, other forms of marketing such as free gifts [with purchases],” much of which is targeted at children.
The flip-side of this, Frank explained, is the need to “tie this together with the promotion of healthy foods – because if we are restricting unhealthy ultra-processed products in an economy where we have high levels of unemployment and high levels of poverty, it’s really important that a point is made [by government] to ensure that people that are most vulnerable can afford healthy foods.”