Big Food vs. The People - Lighthouse Reports

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Big Food vs. The People

NEWSROOM: FOOD SYSTEMS

Co-published with

Lucy Jones for Lighthouse Reports

CREDITS

Thin Lei Win, Emmanuel Freudenthal, Monica Camacho, Sarasvati Nagesh Thuppadolla, Elena DeBre, Tessa Pang, Wael Eskandar, Lu Min Lwin, Viktoriia Maksymova, Charles Boutaud, Margot Gibbs and Beatriz Ramalho da Silva with Alexandria Bordas, Andrea Rincón, Andrew Gregory, Ankit Raj, Armando Talamantes, Ed Wanderley, Edier Buitrago, Gloria Riva, ⁨Guilherme Cavalcanti, Irene van den Berg⁩, ⁨Jahnavi Sen, ⁨Jesse Kathan, ⁨João Peres⁩, ⁨Kennia Velazquez⁩, ⁨Laura Martínez Mejía, Maria Martha Bruno, Nicoletta Dentico, Paulina Macias Ortega, Philip Baker, Rodrigo Oliveira, Scott Slater, Thalita Pires

July 22, 2026

We expose Big Food’s 239 lawsuits against life-saving policies

Bad diets kill millions of people globally every year, and lead to tens of billions of dollars in health costs, often placing the heaviest burden on communities who are least able to afford it. Children, with limited decision-making power, are particularly vulnerable to this.

Legislators and government officials have worked to rein in this public health crisis by enacting laws that require food companies to be transparent about their ingredients and limit the advertising of unhealthy foods.

In public, the world’s biggest and richest food companies such as Coca Cola, PepsiCola, and Mondelez say they want to be part of the solution. But behind closed doors, they have taken governments to court to delay, dilute, and derail public health laws, which the companies say violate their rights.

This cross border collaboration with health academics and an international media coalition shed light on how transnational corporations use legal tactics – lawsuits and legal threats – to stymie public health efforts in six countries where such tactics are most apparent: Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, India, Britain, and the United States.

Credit: Revisual Labs for Lighthouse Reports<br>We found:

– 239 lawsuits were filed between 2010 and 2025 across Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, the US, the UK, and India against public health policies targeting food and beverages such as front of pack labelling, regulating advertising junk food to children, soda taxes, and taxes on ultra processed foods.

– The cases add up to 595 years of litigation, representing a significant burden on the governments defending their health policies.

– Of the cases brought by private companies where the plaintiff was identifiable, more than 1 in 3 came from just nine parent groups, led by Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Mondelez

Their actions are not only prolonging the public health crisis but also cost countries billions of dollars in both legal and healthcare costs. In addition, they have a chilling effect on policymakers that wish to better their citizens’ health but do not have the resources to engage in drawn-out legal fights with food companies.

Credit: Revisual Labs for Lighthouse Reports<br>METHODS

We constructed a dataset of challenges to laws aiming to improve population nutrition between 2010 and 2025 in these countries: Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, U.S., UK, and India.

With the exception of India, cases were included when a regulation that sought to improve public health through better nutrition was being challenged (i.e. validity, scope, or implementation). We made an exception for cases in India where influencers were being sued, as they were taking over the role of the government in making the nutritional value of products more transparent.

We only included cases that were verifiable through official legal databases, court records, or reputable secondary sources.

Credit: Revisual Labs for Lighthouse Reports<br>We excluded cases solely concerning non-manufacturers such as fresh produce or when companies were appealing fines and other judgments unrelated to public health policies.

This research was done in collaboration with researchers from the University of Caldas (Colombia); Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center (United States); the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil); and the University of Sydney (Australia). They found more lawsuits through a systematic legal search in Colombia, Brazil and Mexico.

An upcoming academic paper will be published alongside the media articles, looking at the dataset from a scientific perspective.

This dataset built on the work and insight of El Poder del Consumidor (Mexico), the FULL database developed by the Global Center for Legal Innovation on Food Environments at the O’Neill Institute and the Global Health Advocacy Incubator, CAJAR (Colombia), and ACT (Brazil).

STORYLINES

– Mexico

More than a third of Mexican schoolchildren and 41% of adolescents were overweight according to a 2022 national survey.

This is the country where we found the most lawsuits (193 out of 239), many of them were against the country’s labelling regulation. Quinto Elemento Lab reveals the companies’ arguments: that the...