San Francisco’s New Food Lawsuit Against Kellanova and Kellogg

On December 2, 2025, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu filed the San Francisco ultra-processed food lawsuit in state Superior Court, suing eleven of the largest food manufacturers in the country on claims that they engineered addictive products and deceptively marketed them to children.¹ It is the first government-led case of its kind, and as of mid-2026 it is pending in San Francisco Superior Court after a federal judge sent it back there in May.²

Who Was Sued and On What Grounds

The complaint names Kraft Heinz, Kellanova, WK Kellogg Co., PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Nestlé USA, General Mills, Mars, Mondelez International, Post Holdings, and ConAgra Brands, along with Does 1 through 50. It brings two causes of action under California law: violation of the state’s Unfair Competition Law and public nuisance.³

The city alleges that the defendants designed their products to be addictive, knew they were dangerous when consumed over the long term, and hid those risks behind deceptive marketing. The complaint focuses on children, pointing to cartoon mascots, colorful packaging, saturation advertising, and cross-promotions with toy and entertainment brands as tactics that drove overconsumption of foods linked to type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, and other chronic conditions.³

The complaint also draws a corporate line between tobacco and food. Starting in the 1960s, it alleges, companies like R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris acquired major food brands including Kraft and Nabisco and transferred expertise in addiction science to the food side. It quotes directly from internal materials, including a 1999 warning from a former Kraft executive that the food industry could someday face tobacco-style litigation.¹

What the City Is Asking For

San Francisco is not primarily seeking money damages. The complaint asks the court for declaratory and injunctive relief, statutory civil penalties, and what it calls “abatement relief.”¹ In practice, that means orders to stop deceptive marketing, to require the companies to correct or lessen the effects of their past conduct, and to pay costs tied to the public health burden the city says it has borne.⁴ No dollar figure appears in the complaint or in public filings.

The framing matters. By building the case around unfair competition and public nuisance instead of personal injury, the city avoids having to prove that a specific product caused a specific person’s disease. It argues instead that the companies’ collective conduct created a public health crisis that forced the city to spend money addressing it, the same theory that drove the tobacco settlements of the late 1990s.⁵

Why the Tobacco Comparison Is Doing Real Work

The parallel to Big Tobacco is more than rhetorical. The two legal theories at the heart of the complaint, public nuisance and consumer fraud, are the same ones that drove the tobacco cases. Public nuisance frames the industry as having created a widespread health threat that costs governments money to manage. Consumer fraud focuses on marketing dangerous products as safe while knowing better.⁵

The addiction science underpinning the case tracks the tobacco model too. University of Michigan psychologist Ashley Gearhardt has argued that ultra-processed foods meet the same criteria for addiction set out in the 1988 Surgeon General’s report on tobacco.⁶ A 2023 review in the BMJ, covering 281 studies across 36 countries, found that around 14 percent of adults and 12 percent of children show signs of addiction to ultra-processed foods, rates comparable to alcohol and tobacco. Studies cited in connection with the tobacco-era food brands found that products owned by tobacco companies during the 1980s and 1990s were 80 percent more likely to be classified as hyper-palatable than foods from non-tobacco-owned companies.⁷

The International Food and Beverage Alliance has called the tobacco comparisons “inaccurate,” arguing that food is essential to life in a way tobacco never was and that the comparison oversimplifies complex nutrition issues.⁶

How This Case Differs From the Martinez Suit

A private plaintiff got to this fight first. In December 2024, an 18-year-old named Bryce Martinez sued the same group of companies in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, alleging that consuming Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, Coca-Cola, Oreo cookies, and other ultra-processed products had contributed to his diagnoses of type 2 diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease by age 16.⁸ Kraft Heinz removed the case to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in January 2025.⁹

The federal court dismissed the Martinez case in August 2025, finding that the complaint failed to identify specific products the plaintiff consumed and tie them to his injuries. The court did not rule on whether ultra-processed foods are inherently harmful.⁵ The docket shows the case was formally terminated on December 1, 2025. The plaintiff petitioned to file an amended complaint, but as of mid-2026 there is no indication it was accepted.¹⁰

Harvard Law School clinical professor Emily Broad Leib has called the San Francisco case “unique” because it moves the fight from the individual to the societal scale. The unfair competition claim focuses on what the companies knew internally and how they represented product safety, which sidesteps the causation problem that sank Martinez. The public nuisance theory asks for the costs of addressing a community-wide health problem, not compensation for one person’s illness.⁵

What the Companies Are Expected to Argue

Defendants are expected to raise several defenses. They will argue that their products comply with existing FDA regulations, that chronic health conditions have multiple causes beyond diet, including genetics, exercise, and stress, and that the FDA holds primary jurisdiction over food additive safety.⁵ The Consumer Brands Association has also argued that “there is currently no agreed upon scientific definition of ultra-processed food,” attacking the category the case is built on.⁹

Broad Leib has responded that manufacturers have superior internal knowledge about their products and a duty to sell safe products regardless of where the FDA has set the bar. She has pointed to the FDA’s “Generally Recognized as Safe” system, which allows the industry to self-designate substances as safe without mandatory FDA review, and to decades-long delays in banning trans fats and Red Dye No. 3, as evidence of regulatory failure.⁵

Where the Case Stands in 2026

After the complaint was filed, the defendants removed the case to federal court. On May 4, 2026, a federal judge remanded it back to state court, ruling that the California consumer protection and public nuisance claims belonged there.² As of mid-2026, the case is pending before the San Francisco Superior Court. There have been no reported rulings on motions to dismiss or demurrers, no settlements, no trial date, and no discovery disclosures.

The Swiss Re Institute, which analyzes litigation risk for the insurance industry, has warned that if any case in this wave survives early motions and reaches discovery, “internal documents could drive outsized settlements, with large defence costs,” and that a single win could trigger follow-on actions in multiple jurisdictions.¹¹

The Wider Regulatory Picture

The San Francisco case is landing in a regulatory environment that is already shifting. California’s Real Food, Healthy Kids Act, signed in October 2025, codifies a legal definition of ultra-processed foods and bans their sale in school meals starting July 1, 2032.¹ Texas SB 25, enacted in June 2025, requires front-of-label warnings for 44 specified ingredients on new products starting January 1, 2027. Louisiana SB 14, also enacted in June 2025, prohibits 15 ingredients in school meals beginning in the 2028–2029 school year and requires QR code disclosures for 44 “harmful ingredients” on retail products by January 2028.¹¹

At the federal level, the FDA issued a request for information in July 2025 to help develop a uniform definition of ultra-processed foods, but no rule had been published as of late 2025. The 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans now explicitly encourage reducing consumption of highly processed foods.⁵ HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has encouraged state attorneys general to treat ultra-processed foods as a public nuisance, and attorneys general met in October 2025 to discuss enforcement strategies. As of mid-2026, no state attorney general has filed a separate ultra-processed food lawsuit.¹²

1
SF City Attorney. CCSF UPF Complaint
2
TorHoerman Law. Ultra Processed Foods Lawsuit
3
Yale Law School. SFALP Helps File Suit Against Ultraprocessed Food Companies
4
Health Policy Watch. US City Sues Ultra-Processed Food Companies Seeking Restitution for Health Costs
5
Harvard Law School. The New Case Against Ultraprocessed Food
6
STAT News. MAHA Movement Using Anti-Tobacco Playbook Against Big Food
7
U.S. Right to Know. Ultra-Processed Foods: Addictive
8
Morris James. What Is the Ultra-Processed Foods Lawsuit
9
TorHoerman Law. Who Qualifies for the UPF Lawsuit
10
CourtListener. Martinez v. Kraft Heinz Company, Inc.
11
Risk & Insurance. Litigation Shifts the Risk Landscape for Ultra-Processed Foods
12
NPR. San Francisco Sues Manufacturers of Ultraprocessed Foods