San Francisco has filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against some of the country’s largest food and beverage manufacturers, accusing them of engineering and aggressively marketing ultra-processed foods they knew were making Americans sick in order to boost profits.
The complaint, filed Dec. 2 in San Francisco Superior Court, targets nearly a dozen major corporations, including Kraft Heinz, Mondelez International, Post Holdings, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, Nestle USA, Kellanova, WK Kellogg, Mars, and ConAgra Brands. It alleges that the companies’ ultra-processed food products have fueled epidemics of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers while saddling governments with soaring health care costs.
“These companies created a public health crisis with the engineering and marketing of ultra-processed foods,” City Attorney David Chiu said in announcing the suit. “They took food and made it unrecognizable and harmful to the human body. … These companies engineered a public health crisis, they profited handsomely, and now they need to take responsibility for the harm they have caused.”…