California enacts nation’s first law to define and ban ultraprocessed foods

By Sandee LaMotte, CNN

(CNN) — California made history Wednesday by enacting the first law in the United States to define and ultimately ban unhealthy ultraprocessed foods, or UPFs, from meals served to over one billion California schoolchildren annually.

By signing the “Real Food, Healthy Kids Act” into law, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has taken control of a growing movement to reform the nation’s food supply. The state legislature passed the bill in mid-September.

On average, children in the United States get nearly two-thirds of their calories from ultraprocessed foods packed full of additives and high-calorie sugars, salt and fat, according to a recent CDC report.

Not only does the California legislation define ultraprocessed food — a task which most of the world has yet to accomplish — it requires public health officials and scientists to decide which UPFs are most harmful to human health. Any “ultraprocessed food of concern” would then be phased out of the school food supply.

California’s decisive action is a sharp contrast to the “Make American Healthy Again,” or MAHA, movement spearheaded by US Health and Human Services director Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“While folks in DC are commissioning reports and debating hypotheticals, California is leading with decisive action,” Jesse Gabriel, the Democratic California Assemblymember who introduced the bill, said in a press conference.

“Or to put it more bluntly, here in California, we are actually doing the work to protect our kids health, and we’ve been doing it since well before anyone had ever heard of the MAHA movement,” Gabriel added.

The MAHA Commission promised decisive action on ultraprocessed food by August of this year. However, the final report, released in September, only promised the government would “continue efforts” to define ultraprocessed foods.

“Unfortunately, the final MAHA report is all promises and has no teeth,” Barry Popkin, the W.R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health told CNN at the time.

“In my opinion, it shows the food, agricultural, and pharmaceutical industries got to the White House and won the day,” Popkin said.

A strong lobbying effort

That scenario could have happened in California as well, said Bernadette Del Chiaro, senior vice president for California at the Environmental Working Group, or EWG, a health advocacy organization based in Washington, DC, that cosponsored the bill.

“There was very serious opposition. Industry always kicks and screams and fights like bloody hell to keep these bills from becoming law,” Del Chiaro told CNN. “Just the number of committees we had to go through to get the bill passed illustrates how much lobbying was going on.”

The final vote, however, told it all: out of 120 California assemblymembers and senators from both the Republican and Democratic parties, only one voted no — a Republican from San Diego.

“We had broad bipartisan support because ultimately, this is coming from the grassroots up — from politicians hearing about these issues in their community and wanting to do something about it,” Del Chiaro said. “We’re in this moment where Americans are waking up to the fact that we have chemicals in everything — our food, our water and our air — and we need to do something about it.”

CNN reached out to the Consumer Brands Association, which represents major food manufacturers, but did not hear back before publication.

The best and worst ultraprocessed foods

The “Real Food, Healthy Kids Act” specifically defines an ultraprocessed food as one that may contain such ingredients as nonnutritive sweeteners; high amounts of saturated fat, sodium and added sugar; additives such as emulsifiers, stabilizers and thickeners, flavor enhancers, a host of food dyes; and more.

The California law provides guidance on how much of an ingredient like sugar or salt can be in a food in order to be served to elementary and middle-school children, with a slightly different standard for high schoolers.

But not all ultraprocessed foods will be phased out of the state’s school supply, Gabriel told CNN.

“We can’t eliminate all ultraprocessed foods — we need them, we need the shelf stability, the safety, the convenience,” he said. “But the foods with the most harmful additives, foods that are linked to food addiction or cancer or diabetes or fatty liver disease, that’s the group of ultraprocessed foods we will phase out of our schools.”

An ultraprocessed food can also be banned for containing additives that have been banned, restricted or required to carry a warning by other local, state, federal or international jurisdictions, according to the law. (The European Union has taken action on various food dyes and other additives.)

Another red flag: Has the ultraprocessed food been modified to include high levels of sugar, salt or fat? (That’s a key way manufacturers design ultraprocessed foods to meet the “bliss point” human taste buds yearn for.)

It won’t happen overnight

Eliminating ultraprocessed foods from the California school food supply is not going to be a quick process. In earlier iterations of the bill, regulators were required to take some actions in 2026. In the final law, the first regulation — requiring food vendors to report all ultraprocessed foods they will supply — is due on or before February 1, 2028. All ultraprocessed food of concern must be identified and out of schools by July 1, 2035.

There’s also a concern that California’s efforts could be derailed by a federal government controlled by Republicans.

“We are constantly concerned that Congress will fight to preempt our authority with some kind of watered down, weak federal effort,” Del Chiaro said. “There’s certainly members of Congress that are threatening that, right?

“But we had broad bipartisan support, and I would certainly hope that, politicians at the federal level see that we’re all on the same team. We’re on Team Public Health and Team Kids and I hope they will continue to let states be the laboratories of democracy that we are.”

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