San Francisco vs. Big Food

Can a lawsuit change how America eats?

At a press conference earlier this month, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu pointed to a table covered in Oreos, Lunchables, Cheetos, Hot Pockets, and Pringles. “My mother used to bribe me with Pringles to get me into the pool to take swim lessons,” he said. “I still crave them to this day.”

Chiu’s office has filed suit against ten of the country’s largest food manufacturers, alleging they knowingly engineered addictive products and marketed them aggressively to children and communities of color.

The complaint cites a stark disparity: in San Francisco, average life expectancy is 82 years, but for Black residents it’s 66. Diabetes-related hospitalizations in Black communities run several times higher than for other groups.

The mission is worth supporting. Sixty-seven percent of the calories consumed by American kids now come from ultra-processed foods. That’s a crisis worth naming. But litigation is a backward-looking instrument. It argues about what happened. It doesn’t redesign what happens next.

The Definition Trap

The complaint defines ultra-processed foods as “former whole foods that have been broken down, chemically modified, combined with additives, and then reassembled using industrial techniques.” It references the NOVA classification system, which categorizes foods by processing level rather than nutritional outcome.

This is where the legal case faces a challenge. The Consumer Brands Association has already responded that the term lacks a settled scientific definition. The critique is self-serving, deployed to muddy waters and buy time, but it points to a real ambiguity. When you classify foods by how they were made rather than what they do to you, you end up lumping together infant formula and Doritos. That doesn’t mean we should stop investigating the links between heavily processed foods and health outcomes. It means we need sharper tools than the ones we currently have.

Industry defenders often argue that we shouldn’t scrutinize ultra-processed foods because processing made food cheap and plentiful. That’s disingenuous. Processing did enable a big part of modern society. But that doesn’t mean we give the industry a pass when those same techniques were used to engineer products implicated in rising rates of chronic disease.

The better frame would be outcomes over methods—judge foods by what they contain and what they do to you, not by how they were manufactured. But that’s harder than it sounds. Measuring what goes into products made at industrial scale is genuinely difficult. Nutritional content can vary by batch, by source, by season. You can’t easily regulate what you can’t consistently measure.

Processing categories are a workaround. They’re imperfect, but they’re enforceable—courts can look at how something was made more easily than they can adjudicate its metabolic effects. The problem is that ‘ultra-processed’ lumps together infant formula and Doritos. That ambiguity is exactly what industry lawyers will exploit. This lawsuit may have picked a fight on terrain where the definitions are too slippery to win.

And even if San Francisco wins, then what? The best-case scenario is a settlement: monetary penalties, marketing restrictions, maybe a public health fund earmarked for the communities named in the complaint. That’s not nothing.

Marketing restrictions in particular could matter—advertising shapes preference, especially in children, and limiting exposure has downstream effects.

But the core business model survives. The companies write a check, adjust their media buys, and keep selling the same products through different channels. Settlement is how industries metabolize accountability without changing.

If Big Food wins, the setback is more lasting. A court ruling that ultra-processed foods don’t meet the legal threshold for public nuisance wouldn’t just end this case—it would set precedent. Future plaintiffs in other cities would face a higher wall. A loss here could close a door that took decades to pry open.

And then there’s the clock. Litigation is slow by design. Discovery takes years. Appeals extend timelines further. The tobacco Master Settlement Agreement came in 1998, decades after the first serious research linked cigarettes to lung cancer. Big Food has deep pockets and every incentive to delay. The kids eating Lunchables today will be adults before this is resolved. Meanwhile, nothing changes in the food supply while the case winds through the courts.

The Tension Inside Big Food

Three weeks before the lawsuit was filed, a recording surfaced of Campbell’s VP Martin Bally calling the company’s products “shit for fucking poor people.” He made racist comments about coworkers and admitted to coming to work high. Campbell’s fired him. The recording was inexcusable. It confirmed what critics have long suspected: some people inside these companies hold their own customers in contempt.

But here’s what makes it complicated. The same week that tape went viral, people inside other food companies were working on regenerative agriculture pilots, reformulating products to reduce sodium, trying to get internal buy-in for cleaner ingredient labels. They took jobs at Big Food not because they love the legacy portfolio but because they believe the only way to change the food system at scale is from inside.

The lawsuit treats these companies as monocultures. They aren’t. Every major food manufacturer is running two businesses simultaneously, and those businesses are at war with each other. The legacy portfolio pays the bills: Doritos, Lunchables, Coca-Cola Classic. Then there’s the emerging portfolio: the better-for-you acquisitions, the reformulation projects, the sustainability initiatives that don’t yet move quarterly earnings but represent a bet on where consumers are heading.

PepsiCo acquired Siete Foods for more than a billion dollars. Mars bought Kevin’s Natural Foods. These weren’t charity purchases. They were hedges—acknowledgments that the old playbook has a shelf life. The parent companies saw where preferences were moving and decided it was more capital-efficient to acquire access to health-conscious consumers than to build it internally.

But legacy still dominates. At PepsiCo, more than half of revenue comes from Frito-Lay snacks. At Coca-Cola, the flagship cola remains the profit engine. The people defending old products have more organizational power than the people building new ones.

And when economic waters get choppy, the “future” is the first thing thrown overboard. Past recessions reveal a consistent pattern: companies cut R&D, sustainability pilots, and lower-margin healthy brands to protect the margins of their cash cows. When the CFO looks for savings, they don’t cut the marketing budget for the flagship soda. They cut the sodium reduction team.

This is why naming the harm isn’t the same as changing the incentives. Litigation doesn’t shift the internal balance of power. It gets routed to legal, becomes a line item, a risk to be managed. The reformulation team doesn’t get more budget because San Francisco filed suit. The regenerative agriculture pilot doesn’t survive the next earnings call because there’s a complaint working through discovery.

Culture sets the table, but institutional pressure shifts the balance—procurement standards, marketing restrictions, the kind of external force that changes the business case. A hospital system says it won’t buy products exceeding a certain sodium threshold, and suddenly the reformulation team has revenue on the line. Marketing restrictions pass, and brand managers can’t target kids. Procurement standards tighten, and the people fighting for change finally have leverage in budget meetings.

We’ve seen this work. Trans fat elimination didn’t happen because consumers got educated or because someone sued. It happened because local bans in Tiburon and New York created a patchwork that forced national reformulation. Restaurant chains couldn’t maintain two supply systems. Labeling requirements made trans fat visible, and companies reformulated preemptively to avoid disclosing it.

The FDA’s eventual ban came years after the industry had already changed. In the years following New York’s restrictions, hospital admissions for heart attacks and strokes dropped measurably more in counties with bans than without. The change agents inside Big Food won their budget fights because the external environment made the healthier product the profitable product.

The goal isn’t to punish these companies. It’s to change the conditions under which they operate—so that the people inside who are trying to do better actually have a chance to win.

If Not Litigation, Then What

San Francisco is right to name the harm. But naming a harm is not the same as changing a system. Court victories are backward-looking by design: they argue about what happened, not what will happen next.

If we want different food, we need different incentives. And we know what those look like.

Start with procurement. Schools, hospitals, prisons, city contracts—these institutions feed millions daily. San Francisco could mandate that city-contracted food service meet specific nutritional thresholds tomorrow. No judge, no discovery, no appeals. Just a purchasing standard. The signal ripples through supply chains immediately.

Then marketing. Chile banned advertising sugary foods to children and required front-of-package warning labels; purchases dropped 23.7%. Mexico’s soda tax cut purchases 7.6% over two years while water sales rose. The U.S. could follow, state by state, the way trans fat bans spread from Tiburon to New York to federal policy.

Formulation targets work too. The UK’s sugar reduction program published league tables showing which companies hit targets and which didn’t. Nobody wants to be the laggard on a government spreadsheet. Breakfast cereal sugar dropped by double digits in just a few years.

And agricultural policy. The federal government spends billions subsidizing commodity crops that become cheap inputs for ultra-processed foods. Redirecting even a fraction toward specialty crops or regenerative practices would change the unit economics that make the least nutritious calories the cheapest to produce.

None of this is easy. Each lever has its own political economy, its own coalition to build. But they share something important: they change the conditions under which food companies operate rather than asking a court to adjudicate harms after the fact.

The goal isn’t to beat Big Food in court—it’s to make the healthier product the easier product, the cheaper product, the one that shows up in cafeterias and corner stores without anyone having to opt in. That’s what winning looks like: not a settlement check, but a food environment where the default doesn’t make you sick.

A lawsuit might extract a penalty, but it won’t redesign a system. And the system is what needs to change.

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