Tobacco Industry's Playbook Shaped Ultra-Processed Food, Research Shows

In the 1980s, something peculiar happened in American business. The major tobacco companies—Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds, Altria—began buying up some of the country's largest food manufacturers. Philip Morris acquired Kraft General Foods. Reynolds took Nabisco. At the time, it seemed like simple diversification, a hedge against the coming restrictions on cigarettes. But researchers studying archived internal documents now say it was something more deliberate: a transfer of expertise. The same technologies and strategies that had spent decades making cigarettes addictive were being repurposed to engineer ultra-processed foods.

Laura Schmidt, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, has been combing through tobacco company archives. What she found was striking. For decades, tobacco firms had invested heavily in understanding how to make cigarettes more pleasurable and more addictive—using chemical additives, flavor engineering, processing innovations. Internal records show that when these companies moved into food manufacturing, they didn't abandon that knowledge. They applied it. The very techniques used to optimize nicotine's addictive properties, Schmidt explains, were transferred wholesale into the development of ultra-processed foods. The result was a new category of products engineered to be hyper-palatable: foods containing unnaturally high combinations of fat, sugar, sodium, and carbohydrates that activate the brain's reward system in ways that make stopping difficult.

The specifics reveal the mechanics of this transfer. Philip Morris, for instance, applied the same flavor technologies it had used to make lower-nicotine cigarettes more appealing to the creation of lower-fat cheeses and processed meats. The company developed Lunchables using this playbook. Even the marketing language migrated from tobacco to food. The term "king size," which originated as a way to market longer cigarettes, became standard for packaged snacks and candies. When health-conscious consumers began avoiding certain products, tobacco companies deployed another familiar strategy: they created "light" and "reduced" versions—light cigarettes had their parallel in reduced-fat cheeses and other modified products designed to retain customers who might otherwise quit.

A former Philip Morris CEO, according to Schmidt's research, explicitly noted the similarity: ultra-processed foods and cigarettes were fundamentally the same kind of business—low-cost consumer packaged goods with enormous markets. The timing mattered. From the 1980s through the mid-2000s, while tobacco giants controlled major food firms, the market became saturated with hyper-palatable ultra-processed foods. Tera Fazzino, a psychology researcher at the University of Kansas, has documented this period and found that foods produced during tobacco company ownership were significantly more likely to be classified as hyper-palatable than those produced before or after.

The health consequences have accumulated steadily. A large body of research already links overconsumption of ultra-processed foods to obesity, diabetes, and early mortality. New studies add to this evidence. One investigation following more than five thousand older Americans over a decade found a possible association between high consumption of ultra-processed foods and increased risk of cognitive impairment and dementia. The environmental toll is equally significant. Companies like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Danone rank among the world's top five plastic polluters. When NPR asked Reynolds and Altria for comment, neither responded. The Consumer Brands Association, representing packaged food companies, emphasized that their members adhere to FDA safety standards and provide consumers with information to make informed choices—a statement that notably did not address environmental impact.

What's striking now is the convergence of three forces. Scientific evidence has become overwhelming. A nationally representative survey of two thousand adults found that across party lines, majorities support government regulation of ultra-processed foods. And political will appears to be shifting. Lindsey Smith Taillie, a nutrition professor at the University of North Carolina, describes it as a tipping point. The same combination of factors—strong science, public support, political momentum—preceded the tobacco wars. Experts predict change will likely come first at the state level. Several states have already restricted or banned synthetic dyes in foods. But litigation may prove more consequential. Jennifer Pomeranz, a food policy expert at New York University, argues that state attorneys general could file suits against food companies for public health damages, mirroring the tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s. The Make America Healthy Again movement has created unusual political space for this kind of action. Pomeranz notes that the last time there was this kind of universal concern about food safety was 1906, when the Food and Drug Act passed. We may be approaching another threshold.