The San Francisco’s attorney’s office, on behalf of the citizens of California, has filed a devastating suit, California v. Kraft Heinz, which targets 10 food company giants, such as Mars, Pepsi, and General Mills and contemplates adding others. I thought I was reasonably knowledgeable about health costs of ultraprocessed foods. But the history and litany of harms in this complaint t goes far beyond I’ve encountered into the mainstream press and the handful of studies I’ve seen.
If you read the filing, which I strongly urge you to do (sadly too big to embed below1), you’ll never want to eat a Cheetos again, although the document also explains why you may be unable to resist. One section of the claim discusses a 1988 Surgeon General list of criteria for addictive substances and how these products meet all three conditions, the substance’s ability to cause compulsive use, induce psychoactive effects via their impact on the brain; and reinforce behavior. The result is that 14% to 20% of US adults being hooked, with results like 20% to 50% of gastric bypass surgery patients continuing to overeat ultraprocessed foods despite vomiting and diarrhea.2
We’ll explain below why this is a formidable filing. The short version is that San Francisco is experienced in this sort of action and won big judgments in tobacco and opioid litigation.
The filing chronicles how Big Tobacco, using the same techniques they had honed with cigarettes. RJ Reynolds targeted food in the 1960s, with the stated intent of building on its expertise in flavors. Hawaiian Punch was the first in a series of deals, with Nabisco in 1985 upping its ante. Phillip Morris bought General Foods in 1985 and Kraft in 1988. A 2006 article article explained the strategy:
112. Philip Morris’ Director of Applied Research distilled his company’s acquisition philosophy thus: “control all of the pleasure drugs that are not regulated.”
113. R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris did not operate their food companies as wholly independent entities but instead rapidly integrated them into the pre-existing tobacco companies.
114. As a result, there was a systematic transfer of people, knowledge, information, and technologies from “Big Tobacco” to the food and beverage industry in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Big Food put the institutional knowledge of these employees to work…
120. The purpose of all this research was not to determine how to make food more flavorful. The purpose was to understand how to exploit the physiological structures of the human brain, to override the body’s natural mechanisms for resisting its addictive qualities, and to evade the body’s ability to control intake.
121. As Dr. [Phillip Morris scientist Frank] Gullotta explained in 1990, the senses of taste, smell, and touch don’t “matter
a didley if you don’t have the effects in the brain. [Consuming UPF] are only pleasurable because of the consequences” in the brain.
The filing gives examples of ongoing, extensive research efforts at defendants like Nestle, Kellogg. ConAgra and Mars to understand and better trigger desired brain reactions, as in pleasure responses as well as the bypassing of normal mechanisms of recognizing satiety.
And it’s not as if these and the other giant defendants can plead ignorance of the tobacco-level damage of their ultraprocessed products. The pleading opens in 1999 with Michael Mudd, Vice President to the predecessor of Kraft Heinz, pleading with industry executives to change course over their exploitation of ultraprocessed foods. It returns to that session later:
200. In December 1953, the CEOs of the major tobacco companies met secretly in New York City. Their purpose was to counter the damage from studies linking smoking to lung cancer. What followed “were decades of deceit and actions that cost millions of lives.”
201. As depicted in the Introduction to this Complaint, Big Food had its own version of that meeting in April 1999, when CEOs from Defendants met secretly in Minneapolis to discuss the “devastating public health consequences” of their actions, including 300,000 excess deaths every year and massive public health costs upwards of $100 billion each year. Executives from Defendants Kraft Heinz, Mondelez, Post Holdings, General Mills, Coca-Cola, Mars, or their predecessors, all attended this meeting.
202. Unfortunately, just like Big Tobacco, Big Food did not change its ways, but, instead, spent the ensuing decades deceiving the public.
The filing documents the strong connections of the food engineering to health damage. Sections from that discussion:
10. This case is not about food that is merely “unhealthy.” This case is about food products with hidden health harms, that Defendants designed to be cheap, colorful, flavorful, and addictive. This case is about food products whose ingredients and manufacturing processes interrupt our bodies’ abilities to function. It is about the Defendants—gigantic food conglomerates, all—who designed, manufactured, marketed, and sold these foods knowing they were dangerous for human consumption…
49. UPF are fundamentally different than the foods that make up traditional diets. A UPF is the result of combining, using a series of mechanized processes, cheap ingredients with enhancers, and additives with little to no food uses outside of processing.
50. UPF are formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, which are created by series of industrial techniques and processes.
51. Ingredients characteristic of UPF are either food substances of no or rare culinary use, or classes of additives whose function is to make the final product sellable and often hyper-palatable…
52. These components are assembled into a final food product using industrial processes which most American consumers have never heard of (such as extrusion, molding, hydrogenation, hydrolyzation, and pre-frying, each of which further transform the chemical makeup of UPF.
I have before recounted the mention in a lecture by an MD and Professor of Medicine at the University of Ohio that hydrogenated fat is so far removed from food that if you left a block on a counter, cockroaches would not touch it. Continuing:
71. Ultra-processing disrupts the nutrient balance that humans are genetically adapted to consume, and a growing body of evidence suggests the human metabolism is not be able to properly process nutrient distributions that substantially deviate from the range and structure of nutrient distributions in foods found in nature, known as the “food matrix.”35 Put simply, UPF bypass the signals our bodies send us that we are full and we can stop eating.
72. High-quality scientific studies with large representative samples have also found that consuming UPF significantly increases risks of a host of serious health problems, including breast, colorectal, pancreatic, lung, and brain cancer; cardiovascular disease, irritable bowel disease, chronic kidney disease, Crohn’s disease, chronic inflammation, Type 2 Diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, disruption of the endocrine system, depression, and anxiety.
74. Some of these alarming results may be attributable to the fact that many of the ingredients in UPF have not been independently tested for safety. Defendants have introduced more than 10,000 such chemicals in our food supply in service of producing UPF.
75. Almost none of these chemicals have undergone long-term testing to determine whether they are safe to be chronically consumed. In fact, the available evidence suggests that many of these chemicals may be toxic even at exceedingly low levels.
The filing also extensively documents how the food behemoths targeting of children, particularly from minority groups, to create life-long addicts, and the resulting population-level harm, notably the significant rise in ailments previously only very rarely seen in pediatric populations, such as what was formerly called “adult onset” diabetes and fatty liver disease.
Reading this complaint, I would think the defendants would be crazy not to settle, assuming they do not succeed via preliminary motions in keeping it from getting to discovery.
Given the 1999 industry conference where the damage to health was presented by industry executives and chosen to be ignored because profit (this by the way in the same time frame when Big Tobacco was negotiating its massive Federal-state settlement), one has to think that internal records contain simply ginormous amount of damaging information. Recall that some would contentd that despite the WHO deeming glyphosate to be a probable carcinogen to humans, that the case against Monsanto were scientifically weak. What cinched it for jurors was that Monsanto had its own workers wear hazmat-level gear when treating fields with its glyphosate product. Roundup, while giving no such warn to do so to farmers and consumer users.
And let’s not forget this recent, erm, unfortunate disclosure:
Campbell's is defending itself after a company executive was allegedly caught on tape calling the soup company's products "highly process[ed] food" for "poor people." https://t.co/NJvl7YxZ2f pic.twitter.com/dI3Ur2Jac6
— ABC News (@ABC) November 25, 2025
We’ll turn the mike over to the New York Times as to why industry execs ought to be sweating bullets over this case, which has the potential to open a tsunami of related litigation:
It is unclear how successful the suit will be…
But the San Francisco city attorney’s office has had success as a groundbreaking public agency on health matters. The office previously won $539 million from tobacco companies and $21 million from lead paint manufacturers.
In 2018, the office also sued multiple opioid manufacturers, distributors and dispensers, reaching settlements with all but one company worth a combined total of $120 million. San Francisco then prevailed at trial over the holdout, Walgreens, scooping up another $230 million.
And it’s not as if a Trump Administration that has gone all in for MAHA will file an amicus brief on behalf of Big Food. Pass the popcorn. I am pretty sure it is healthier than Doritos.
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1 Unless a reader can send me a copy compressed to 2 MB or smaller; I will update the post if so.
2 A real doozy:
89. Tellingly, rodents will risk aversive experiences (e.g., electric shock) to consume UPF (in the form of industrially-produced sweets) when other calorie sources are easily available to them. Rats even show greater resistance to electric shock when attempting to access industrially-produced sweetener than when they are attempting to access methamphetamine. Non-UPF do not elicit these responses in humans or rodents.
