Study Finds Tobacco Industry Tactics Being Applied to Marketing of Ultra-Processed Foods

In 1963, a U.S. tobacco company bought Hawaiian Punch. Over the next three decades, the tobacco industry would acquire and reshape some of America's most recognizable food brands. Now, more than sixty years later, a growing body of research argues that the marketing and product-engineering techniques perfected to sell cigarettes didn't disappear when Big Tobacco divested from food — they were baked into the products themselves [1][2].

A February 2026 study published in The Milbank Quarterly, authored by University of Michigan psychologist Ashley Gearhardt, Yale's Kelly Brownell, and Harvard historian Allan Brandt, makes the most comprehensive case yet that ultra-processed foods — industrially formulated products like soft drinks, packaged snacks, and instant meals — are engineered and marketed using the same five core strategies that made cigarettes so profitable and so deadly [3].

The Corporate Family Tree

The ties between Big Tobacco and Big Food are not metaphorical. They are corporate.

Philip Morris purchased General Foods in 1985 for $5.6 billion and Kraft in 1988 for $12.9 billion [4]. R.J. Reynolds acquired Nabisco, Del Monte, and Hawaiian Punch during the same era [2]. By the late 1980s, these two tobacco conglomerates controlled a vast portfolio of American food brands — from Oreo cookies to Kraft Macaroni & Cheese to Lunchables [4].

According to Laura Schmidt, a professor of health policy at UC San Francisco, the tobacco companies didn't just manage these food brands passively. "They moved all of these thousands of scientists who were for years making tobacco more addictive" to work on food products at companies like Nabisco and Kraft, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stated in a January 2026 radio interview, echoing Schmidt's research [5][2].

Philip Morris (now Altria) spun off Kraft Foods in 2007, formally separating the tobacco and food businesses [4]. But researchers argue the legacy endures in the products themselves: foods reformulated during the tobacco-ownership era to be more palatable, more craveable, and harder to stop eating.

Five Strategies, Two Industries

The Gearhardt study identifies five parallel engineering strategies used by both industries to maximize consumption [3]:

Dose optimization. Just as cigarette manufacturers calibrated nicotine levels to sustain addiction without causing immediate aversion, ultra-processed food companies fine-tune concentrations of sugar, salt, and fat. Gearhardt describes products engineered with "just the right dose" of these ingredients to stimulate the brain's reward pathways without producing satiety [3][5].

Delivery speed. Cigarettes were engineered to deliver nicotine to the brain within seconds. UPFs strip away fiber and protein — natural components that slow digestion — while adding enzymes that accelerate breakdown, creating rapid spikes in blood sugar that the study's authors compare to the pharmacokinetic profile of smoked tobacco [3][6].

Hedonic engineering. Both industries manipulate sensory attributes — flavor, texture, aroma — to enhance reward. The study notes that UPFs increase dopamine release in the brain's striatum by 150% to 200%, a magnitude comparable to nicotine [6][7].

Environmental ubiquity. Cigarettes were once available in vending machines in hospitals and schools. UPFs are now sold in pharmacies, gas stations, and dollar stores — often in the same low-income neighborhoods where healthy food access is limited [3][8].

Deceptive reformulation. Both industries respond to health concerns with products marketed as safer alternatives — "light" cigarettes, "reduced fat" snacks — that the study characterizes as creating "the illusion of reduced harm while preserving their core addictive properties" [1][3].

How Much Americans Consume

About 60% of calories in the average American diet now come from ultra-processed foods, up from roughly 53.5% in 1990, according to USDA and NYU research [2][9]. For children, the figures are starker: nutritionist Barry Popkin of the University of North Carolina estimates that 75% to 80% of what American children eat is ultra-processed [10].

Source: USDA / NYU Research

Data as of Jan 1, 2025CSV

This consumption is not evenly distributed. Households with lower incomes and lower education levels purchase a higher proportion of ultra-processed foods [8]. People with low food security consume nearly 6% more UPFs than those with high food security [8]. Black and Asian American populations experience higher rates of diet-related diseases linked to UPF consumption, a pattern that researchers tie in part to the concentration of convenience stores, dollar stores, and fast-food restaurants — "hubs of ultra-processed foods" — in communities of color [8][11].

Source: WHO Global Health Observatory

Data as of Dec 31, 2024CSV

The United States has the highest adult obesity prevalence among major economies at 41%, according to 2024 WHO data. Countries with lower UPF consumption rates, including Japan (5.9%) and South Korea (8.4%), have markedly lower obesity rates [12].

The Lobbying Machine

Between 1998 and 2020, the ultra-processed food industry spent $1.15 billion on federal lobbying in the United States — more than the tobacco industry ($755 million), the gambling industry ($817 million), or the alcohol industry ($541 million) over the same period, according to an analysis of OpenSecrets data published in The Milbank Quarterly in 2024 [13].

In 2023 alone, the food and beverage industry spent $27.9 million on federal lobbying [14]. The industry's political influence has been credited with delaying or defeating proposals for advertising restrictions on foods marketed to children, mandatory front-of-package warning labels, and limits on sales in schools [15][16].

Companies also fund industry groups that shape public discourse. The Consumer Brands Association, which represents many of the companies named in the San Francisco lawsuit, has pushed back against UPF regulation by arguing there is "no agreed upon scientific definition of ultra-processed foods" and that "attempting to classify foods as unhealthy simply because they are processed...misleads consumers" [10].

A seven-figure advertising campaign launched by the International Food and Beverage Alliance in 2026 emphasized job creation and product safety [5].

San Francisco Takes Big Food to Court

In early 2026, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu filed suit against 10 of the nation's largest food manufacturers: Kraft Heinz, Mondelez International, Post Holdings, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, Nestlé USA, Kellogg, Mars, and ConAgra Brands [10][17].

The lawsuit alleges that these companies "marketed and sold ultraprocessed foods known to be harmful," designed products to be addictive, and used "deceitful tactics" inherited from the tobacco industry [17][18]. UC San Francisco's Laura Schmidt told NBC News the case "reminds her of litigation against the tobacco industry" — the landmark state attorney general lawsuits of the 1990s that produced the $206 billion Master Settlement Agreement [10].

The case is the first major government action of its kind against the food industry and could establish legal precedents that shape regulation for decades.

What Other Countries Have Done

While U.S. regulation has stalled, several countries have moved aggressively.

Chile implemented the Law of Food Labelling and Advertising in June 2016, requiring front-of-pack warning labels on products high in sugar, saturated fat, sodium, or energy, banning child-directed marketing for those products, and restricting sales in schools. It also raised taxes on high-sugar beverages from 13% to 18%. The results were significant: purchases of sugar-sweetened beverages fell 25%, packaged desserts dropped 17%, and breakfast cereals declined 14% [19][20].

Source: The Lancet Planetary Health

Data as of Sep 1, 2021CSV

Mexico adopted front-of-pack warning labels in 2020 — black octagonal labels warning of excess calories, sugar, salt, saturated fat, and trans fat. The country also implemented a soda tax, banned sales of sugary beverages and processed foods in schools, and restricted advertising [21].

Eight additional countries, spanning most of South America plus Canada, have since introduced similar front-of-package labels [19].

These results stand in contrast to the U.S., where efforts to implement comparable measures have faced sustained industry opposition. The Food and Drug Administration's attempts to update front-of-package labeling have been mired in rulemaking delays for years [15][16].

The Counterargument: Is the Tobacco Analogy Overreach?

Not all scientists accept that comparing ultra-processed foods to cigarettes is analytically sound.

Professor Martin Warren, chief scientific officer at the Quadram Institute, a specialist food research center in the UK, cautioned that the Gearhardt study risks "overreach." Warren questioned whether ultra-processed foods are "intrinsically addictive in a pharmacological sense, or whether they mainly exploit learned preferences, reward conditioning and convenience" [6][22].

The distinction matters. Nicotine acts on specific acetylcholine receptors in the brain with a well-characterized pharmacological mechanism. There is no single compound in UPFs that functions the same way. Critics argue that the dopamine comparisons, while striking, conflate the brain's general reward response to palatable food with the specific neurochemical hijacking produced by drugs of abuse [6][22].

There is also a fundamental difference in safe consumption thresholds. No level of cigarette smoking is safe. But most nutritional scientists agree that moderate consumption of processed foods is compatible with good health — the harm appears to be dose-dependent and cumulative, not inherent in any single exposure [22].

The International Food and Beverage Alliance put the point bluntly: "Comparisons between food and tobacco are inaccurate and risk oversimplifying complex nutrition challenges." Food, unlike tobacco, is essential to life [5].

However, a 2025 Delphi study involving 40 international experts found near-consensus — 37 of 40 participants — that ultra-processed foods can produce a substance-use disorder with "biochemical, neurological and behavioral" features that parallel acknowledged addictions [23]. This finding suggests the scientific community is converging, though not unanimously, on the addiction framework.

Who Funded the Study — and Does It Matter?

The Gearhardt study was supported by Vital Strategies, a global public health organization whose Food Policy Program is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies [3]. The authors disclosed that the funder "had no role in the design, analysis, interpretation, or writing of the manuscript" [3].

Bloomberg Philanthropies has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on anti-tobacco campaigns globally and has more recently expanded into food policy — a connection that critics could point to as a source of framing bias, since the funder has an institutional interest in extending tobacco-style regulation to new product categories.

The study was published in The Milbank Quarterly, a peer-reviewed journal of population health and health policy published by the Milbank Memorial Fund since 1923. The journal has no disclosed ties to food industry competitors or advocacy groups [3].

Gearhardt, who holds the position of Clinical Science Area Chair and Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, is a leading figure in food addiction research and the creator of the Yale Food Addiction Scale [3][24]. Her body of work has consistently advanced the argument that certain foods can produce addictive responses, which some critics view as a lens that may predispose findings in that direction.

No formal methodological critiques of the study have been published in the peer-reviewed literature as of this writing. The study is a literature synthesis rather than an original empirical investigation, meaning its conclusions depend on the quality and selection of the underlying studies it reviews [3].

A Growing Scientific Field

Academic interest in ultra-processed foods has surged. According to OpenAlex data, publications mentioning "ultra-processed food" grew from fewer than 5,000 in 2011 to more than 45,000 in 2023, a ninefold increase [25].

Source: OpenAlex

Data as of Jan 1, 2026CSV

That growth reflects both genuine scientific concern and the political moment. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "Make America Healthy Again" initiative has adopted anti-tobacco strategies as its framework for food reform, issuing dietary guidelines that urge Americans to avoid ultra-processed foods and framing the issue as a public health emergency [5].

Whether the tobacco analogy ultimately holds in full or functions primarily as a political and rhetorical tool, the underlying data on UPF consumption, corporate concentration, and diet-related disease in the United States present a set of facts that policymakers will increasingly be forced to address. Sixty percent of American calories come from products that a growing number of researchers say were engineered to be overconsumed. What governments choose to do about that — regulation, litigation, taxation, or nothing — will shape public health for a generation [3][9][10].