The Ultraprocessed Food Makers Have An Answer For Rfk Jr.

Makers of ultraprocessed food have struggled all year to find a message to counter Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s, that they are poisoning the American people. They think they’ve hit on one: Kennedy’s plans are going to make already enormous grocery bills even bigger.

Food manufacturers are making that case in an attempt to stop a wave of state moves to regulate food ingredients backed by Kennedy and his Make America Healthy Again movement. The companies think it’ll resonate, considering how affordability concerns dogged GOP candidates in this year’s elections and threaten to again in the higher-stakes 2026 midterms.

“The dynamic here is affordability,” said Sam Geduldig, managing partner at Republican lobbying firm CGCN, which represents Kraft Heinz, the Chicago-based maker of Oscar Mayer hot dogs and Kraft Mac & Cheese. “You have a MAHA movement that would like to accomplish one goal, and then you have an inflation, economic affordability issue on the other side that runs counter."

In late October, major industry trade groups and food companies, including Kraft Heinz as well as frozen-pizza-maker Nestle, and PepsiCo, which along with its signature drink makes all-American favorites Doritos and Cheetos, launched a coalition called Americans for Ingredient Transparency to try to convince policymakers that food regulation should be a federal domain. The group warns in a six-figure ad buy that state-by-state rules will raise costs for consumers.

Businesses of all stripes have long preferred a federal rule when they’re coping with differing state requirements — and gotten Republican help in pursuing preemption. The new coalition’s idea is tailor-made to appeal to GOP orthodoxy that Kennedy’s movement has threatened.

“President Trump is cutting costs and delivering real relief for working families, but these well-intentioned state bills are creating a patchwork of labeling regulations that could undermine his goal to lower costs for Americans,” Andy Koenig, a former special assistant to Trump and a senior adviser to Americans for Ingredient Transparency, wrote in a statement to POLITICO.

The food industry’s gambit comes on the heels of a year of record spending on K Street, Washington’s lobbying corridor, and lands as Trump’s own voters increasingly fault him for the high cost of living, the issue that helped fuel his return to the White House after years of rapid price rises.

A recent POLITICO poll with Public First found that Americans across demographic groups rank cost of living as the nation’s top problem, with 45 percent naming grocery prices as the “most challenging” expense, surpassing housing and health care costs. While food prices are up 2.6 percent since a year ago, slightly under overall inflation, prices for specific food items like non-alcoholic beverages, meat, poultry, fish and eggs have risen much higher, up more than 4 percent.

At the same time, polls show Americans share Kennedy’s belief that consumption of ultraprocessed foods is making people sick. A survey from health research group KFF and the Washington Post in October found large majorities cite highly processed foods as a major threat to children’s health.

Kennedy’s leaned hard into the argument, taking on iconic American brands in the process. At his confirmation hearing in January, for example, he said the companies are loading food up with chemicals. “If you buy McDonald's french fries in our country, there's 11 ingredients,” he said. “If you buy Froot Loops in our country, they're loaded with food dyes, with yellow dye, red dye, blue dye.”

Kennedy is pursuing a federal rule change that would mandate more scrutiny when food makers change their recipes or add new ingredients. But he’s also encouraged states, including Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma, to go it alone.

In state legislatures across the country, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have introduced more than a hundred bills to improve nutrition by cracking down on sugary beverages, synthetic food dyes and chemicals often found in ultraprocessed foods, up nearly fivefold since last year, according to a POLITICO analysis in August.

The most notable regulations include a first-in-the-nation ban in California on ultraprocessed foods in schools and a Texas law requiring food companies to put warning labels on products that include any of 44 additives. The food industry is challenging Texas in court.

“These state laws are ultimately going to lead to increased cost,” said Charles Leftwich, vice president of food safety and quality assurance at Sysco, the country’s largest food distributor and a sponsor of AFIT. “Those costs are ultimately going to get passed down to consumers.”

Calls for a federal standard that would preempt the states’ have prompted backlash from MAHA supporters and consumer advocates, who warn that leaving the decision to lawmakers in Washington, where the food lobby is powerful, will likely result in a weaker standard, or no change at all.

“A federal standard favors large multinational companies with a lot of money to lobby for less restrictive standards,” said Jennifer Galardi, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation focused on MAHA-aligned issues.

“We see a state-by-state approach as emulating the checks and balances that our federalist system was designed to produce.”

Food industry lobbyists say they expect the fight for a federal standard to dominate their agenda next year and predict economic anxiety will help them defeat MAHA, which has united an unlikely mix of vaccine sceptics, nutrition advocates and libertarians behind Kennedy.

“The MAHA movement is important…It will not take priority or precedence over finding ways to lower the price of goods,” said one food lobbyist granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

Whether a Republican-led Congress will rally behind a federal standard will test whether Republicans are still the party of business they once were.

In areas outside MAHA’s purview, there’s ample evidence they are. In December, for example, Trump signed an executive order to overrule state regulations around artificial intelligence, a move that has divided his party. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Kennedy said a federal standard was “on the table for discussion” and that 50 differing state rules was “impossible” for industry.

And on Capitol Hill, the food industry is getting support from traditional allies. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who serves on the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee and has defended food interests to Kennedy, said he’s talking to them.

“I applaud the Trump administration’s efforts to bring down food costs and fight inflation. Congress is welcoming industry feedback on whether a federal standard for certain food products is needed,” he wrote.

For industry observers, the statements are a sign of corporate America’s continued power despite Kennedy’s populist, anti-corporate rhetoric.

“Superficially, the Democrats and the Republicans are populists, but in reality, they’re protecting the food industry, the pharmaceutical industry, AI and other industries from regulation,” said Lawrence Gostin, a public health lawyer at Georgetown University.

A lobbying bonanza

Kennedy has repeatedly taken aim at the food industry, once calling ultraprocessed foods “poison” and vowing to “scrutinize” chemical additives in his confirmation hearing.

Trump’s decision to put him in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services sent the food industry scrambling.

Lobbying spending from major food companies and their trade associations in Washington reached record highs this year. The American Beverage Association, representing non-alcoholic drink makers, spent $2.39 million in the first nine months of this year, surpassing annual totals for every year since 2010, while Kraft Heinz spent $1.35 million, the highest on record for the period. Third quarter spending from Nestle is at a seven-year high, while spending for the quarter for PepsiCo and Tyson Foods, maker of Jimmy Dean breakfast sausages and Ball Park franks, is at their highest for the period in at least a decade.

The money appears to be having an impact. The final version of a Kennedy-backed report on strategies for combatting chronic disease in children in September took a softer stance on ultraprocessed foods than an earlier assessment of the situation from May. The strategy document called for a federal definition of ultraprocessed foods. The earlier report said ultraprocessed foods were “detrimental” to children’s health.

Earlier this year, major companies, including Kraft Heinz and Nestle, made commitments to voluntarily phase out artificial dyes from their products. But now the food industry is launching a counteroffensive to the laws emerging from state legislatures targeting their ingredients.

“It is one of the top things we are planning around,” said one lobbyist for a beverage maker granted anonymity to speak candidly about strategy.

In October, more than three dozen food companies and trade associations launched Americans for Ingredient Transparency to call for a uniform federal standard. They commissioned a survey from Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio and Bob Ward, another Republican; launched a six-figure ad campaign; and hired former Republican congressional staffer Julie Gunlock and Koenig as senior advisers.

For Washington’s lobbyists, the strategy from the food industry is emblematic of a new influence playbook emerging in Trump’s Washington as corporate America faces increased difficulty in reaching an administration that is more insular and skeptical of business than the first time around.

“It's a question of how you break through in this moment of dissonance,” said one food industry lobbyist, granted anonymity to talk candidly about client strategy.

Other industries have employed similar tactics.

In November, Build American AI, backed by AI-industry PAC Leading the Future, launched a $10 million ad campaign to push for a federal standard for AI. Trump signed an executive order on it less than a month later.

In March, Keep Americans Covered, an interest group of insurers, hospitals and patient groups, launched a seven-figure ad campaign to urge Congress to preserve enhanced Obamacare subsidies, which expire at the end of the year.

Like the food companies, Keep Americans Covered has cited polls by Fabrizio and Ward and John McLaughlin, another Trump pollster, in its messaging.

“They wanted the president to take it seriously,” said Geduldig. “Fabrizio's name means a lot to the president and his team.”

MAHA pushback

MAHA movement leaders and other advocacy groups warn that nullifying state rules will result in weaker standards.

Melanie Benesh, vice president of government affairs for the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group focused on toxic chemicals, called a preemptive rule the “worst thing” that could be done to improve food safety.

“This isn’t about affordability. This is about maintaining the status quo,” she said.

States and localities often move more quickly than the federal government in setting stricter health and environmental rules. The federal government banned trans fats in 2021, for example. That was 14 years after New York City first restricted them. California’s Proposition 65, adopted by voters in 1986, has led to sector-wide changes in product warning labels for chemicals.

On Capitol Hill, MAHA advocates are flexing their muscles.

According to a New York Times report, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) had considered proposing a bill with a provision to create new federal food standards to preempt state ones, but removed the language following pushback from advocates.

Still, it was a signal that even someone like Marshall, a founder of the congressional MAHA Caucus, has industry in his ear.

In addition to a federal food standard, Republicans in Congress have voiced support for a measure in an upcoming appropriations bill that would block lawsuits against pesticide makers, following a year-long push from Bayer, the maker of the world’s most popular herbicide, through a coalition of commodity industry groups and farming organizations known as the Modern Ag Alliance.

“It shows the enormous power of the food industry on the federal government,” said Diana Winters, deputy director of the Resnick Center for Food Law and Policy at UCLA. “By trying to shift this authority to the federal government, it's taking away regulation."

With help from Grace Yarrow