When the largest processed-food and soda companies in America form a coalition and name it “Americans for Ingredient Transparency,” a reasonable person should assume the name is doing work the products cannot. The work is the combining of political power with corporate profit. The product is another propaganda machine, with you and your children’s health in its crosshairs.
Americans for Ingredient Transparency, or AFIT, launched in October 2025 — about the time processed-food companies could see that the Trump administration would no longer protect the official story that had served them for decades. Its public line is simple, and it is propaganda: a “patchwork” of state food laws confuses shoppers, raises grocery prices, and hurts small business. The cure, it says, is one national standard. That is the same promise that accompanied generations of politicians, academia, and “health” officials pushing the processed-food industry’s food pyramid — the inverted advice that helped spawn a diabetes epidemic in the United States.
This is a bid to pull the fight out of statehouses and keep the machine running in Washington, where the same companies already keep full-time lobbyists and where corporatist politicians are happy to sell out their constituents to the interests that fund them.
This is corporatism in its modern form. These companies do not merely sell cereal, soda, and boxed dinners. They use the coercive power of government to lock in rules they can live with and to extinguish rules they cannot — at the expense of your family’s health.
Who Pays for “Transparency” (Propaganda)
AFIT does not hide its roster. Corporate backers include The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, Nestlé USA, General Mills, Kraft Heinz, Tyson Foods, Conagra, Hormel, Keurig Dr Pepper, McCormick, Ocean Spray, Sysco, and others. Trade groups stand behind them: the Consumer Brands Association, American Beverage, FMI – The Food Industry Association, the American Frozen Food Institute, the National Restaurant Association, and more.
These are not family farms asking for a level playing field. They are the firms that built fortunes on shelf-stable, high-margin products whose color, sweetness, and shelf life depend on industrial additives. When states started writing those additives out of school lunches and, in some cases, out of retail food, the industry did not answer with reformulation alone. It answered with a coalition armed with money — and, of course, politicians.
Consumer Reports put the naming problem in one sentence: if truth-in-labeling applied to campaigns, this group could not call itself what it calls itself. The Environmental Working Group said the same thing in plainer language. The mission is not to tell you more. It is to stop states from requiring disclosure or removal of chemicals the companies still find useful.
What the States Did — and Why Industry Panicked
For years the federal system treated many additives as “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) on the word of the manufacturer. That arrangement was convenient. Dozens of state legislatures finally moved when it became clear the new administration would no longer turn a blind eye to the grift.
Industry’s first answer was the language of concern: confusion, cost, small business. Its second answer was the courthouse. Color manufacturers sued West Virginia. A federal judge later blocked the statewide sales ban as unconstitutionally vague, while the school-meal restriction stayed in force. Industry will take any door that keeps the adult grocery aisle intact. Food and beverage trade groups sued Texas over warning labels, arguing compelled speech and federal preemption.
AFIT is the third answer: ask Congress to write one federal rule that wipes the state experiments off the board.
That is telling. If the science were settled in the companies’ favor, they would welcome fifty laboratories of democracy. What they cannot tolerate is a West Virginia or a Texas proving that a grocery aisle can exist without Red 40 and Yellow 5. Once one state does it, the national brand has a problem. Preemption and politics, as always, “solve” the problem.
The Playbook Is Older Than the Name
This is the same maneuver used whenever a concentrated industry meets a restless public. Call the state laws a “patchwork.” Promise “science-based” uniformity. Offer voluntary pledges and QR codes. Then pull the decision into unaccountable government, closed-door meetings, and backroom dealing so the real rule is written where the public cannot see it.
AFIT says it is ready to work with Congress on GRAS reform, front-of-package labeling, and QR-code rules — so long as the result is a single national standard. Reform of self-affirmed GRAS is not enough. A QR code is not a substitute for a ban a state already passed. A federal “standard” written under industry supervision is not transparency. It is the usual course: a backroom deal that combines the coercive power of government with the money-making power of corporations.
Corporations should be tasked to do one thing: TELL THE TRUTH.
If they do not, the people should be able to take them to court and, to the degree the company lied about its product or service, penalize it financially — and, when prudent, hold the responsible officers personally to account.
Meanwhile the same companies announce dye phase-outs on FDA tracker pages and fund a coalition to keep states from making those phase-outs binding. Voluntary when the cameras are on. Preemptive when the legislatures are in session.
The Corporatist Transaction
A free market does not require a federal veto over state grocery laws. In a free market, grocery-specific statutes are unnecessary. If a company harms someone with its products or services, it should pay the price. If it does not harm anyone, politicians should stay out of it, and businesses should not be asking for political cover.
What AFIT wants is the opposite: one set of rules that, if followed, will shield the corporations from litigation. That legislation is written where the largest players keep an army of lawyers and where politicians are more than happy to be persuaded by monied corporate interests.
The public is told this is about affordability. Affordability is real. It is also the oldest shield in the processed-food argument. The cost that never appears in the press release is the metabolic cost already socialized onto families, insurers, and taxpayers after decades of official advice that treated industrial carbohydrates and cosmetic chemistry as harmless.
You have seen this pattern before. Sugar interests helped steer the conversation toward fat. Guidelines committees filled with industry ties. School kitchens became a guaranteed market for commodity-derived products. Now the same industrial food complex asks Washington to forbid the states from stepping off that path.
The Choice
Americans do not need a coalition of soda and cereal giants to explain ingredients to them. They need accountability.
AFIT’s name is an advertisement. Its roster is the disclosure. When Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Nestlé, General Mills, and Kraft Heinz unite to demand “one standard,” the standard they want is the one that keeps the existing product line intact and uses federal power to make every state — and us — live with it.
That is not transparency. That is the corporate state protecting its inventory with political influence.
States that ban dyes from school lunch or require a warning on a label are not creating chaos. They are doing the job the captured federal process failed to do. The proper response from a free people is not to ask those companies to write the national rule and “trust” the politicians.
Trust the label they wrote for themselves. Then refuse the law they want written for you.
