On December 2, 2025, the Chicago Sun-Times published a front-page story revealing that San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu had filed the nation’s first municipal lawsuit against ten major food manufacturers, including Chicago-based Kraft Heinz, Mondelez International, Kellanova, and Conagra, plus Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, Nestlé USA, Post Holdings, and Mars. The 78-page complaint accuses them of knowingly designing, marketing, and selling ultra-processed foods (NOVA Group 4) that are engineered to be hyper-palatable and addictive, thereby creating a decades-long public-health crisis comparable in scale to tobacco. Most coverage has focused on tobacco parallels, public health claims, and courtroom drama but there are already consequences in the capital-markets happening in the background.
While the San Francisco lawsuit will take 3–5 years to resolve and may settle for a fraction of requested damages, institutional investors controlling trillions in assets operating in shorter timelines might already force a faster and broad change in the F&B industry like they previously did with the energy industry (Scope 3 emissions) and the pharmaceuticals (opioid governance).
On December 2, 2025, the Chicago Sun-Times published a front-page story revealing that San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu had filed the nation’s first municipal lawsuit against ten major food manufacturers, including Chicago-based Kraft Heinz, Mondelez International, Kellanova, and Conagra, plus Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, Nestlé USA, Post Holdings, and Mars. The 78-page complaint accuses them of knowingly designing, marketing, and selling ultra-processed foods (NOVA Group 4) that are engineered to be hyper-palatable and addictive, thereby creating a decades-long public-health crisis comparable in scale to tobacco. Most coverage has focused on tobacco parallels, public health claims, and courtroom drama but there are already consequences in the capital-markets happening in the background. While the San Francisco lawsuit will take 3–5 years to resolve and may settle for a fraction of requested damages, institutional investors controlling trillions in assets operating in shorter timelines might already force a faster and broad change in the F&B industry like they previously did with the energy industry (Scope 3 emissions) and the pharmaceuticals (opioid governance).