Lawsuit planned to stop soda sales in schools

Stephen Gardner, CSPI’s director of litigation, says he expects to file the suit in Massachusetts against the Coca Cola Co. or PepsiCo or both, along with local bottlers. Several of the lawyers working on the issue are veterans of the successful litigation against the tobacco industry and will use what they learned from that experience in the current case.

“We’re fundamentally suing under the consumer protection law in Massachusetts which outlaws unfair and deceptive laws and practices,” Gardner says. “It is unfair to sell junk drinks to a captive audience when the parents are not there. This is just wrong.”

Gardner accuses the soft drink companies of marketing to children “so they will become Pepsi drinkers for life or Coke drinkers for life.” By having these products available in schools, “they carry the school’s imprimatur. Kids believe the schools are endorsing them, even though schools are not actually advocating that Coke is a good thing.”

Nationwide, nearly 75 percent of high schools had contracts in 2003-04 giving a beverage company exclusive rights to sell products to students, states a report published by the Government Accountability Office in 2005. About 65 percent of middle schools and 30 percent of elementary schools had such contracts.

CSPI picked Massachusetts as the first state to focus on because it has strong consumer protection laws and because the Boston school district recently banned junk food from public schools.

Depending on the outcome in Massachusetts, CSPI will consider suits in other states. The group will not target states that already ban junk food in schools, such as California and Texas. If the soft drink companies voluntarily end their involvement with schools or if Congress passes legislation banning junk food in schools, Gardner says, lawsuits won’t be necessary.

The soft drink companies are poised for a counterattack. The American Beverage Association released a study Dec. 1 showing “a sharp decline in school purchases of full-calorie carbonated soft drinks from 2002 to 2004.”  

CSPI Executive Director Michael F. Jacobson called the study “a panicky and desperate attempt at public relations.” He accuses the beverage industry of “trying to make it seem like it’s their benevolence and self-restraint that were responsible for a decline [in soda sales] and not the parents, and increasingly, some policymakers, who are sick of soda companies putting profits ahead of our kids’ health.”

In a related development, a report published Dec. 6 by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies says food and beverage marketing targeted to children ages 12 and under leads them to request and consume high-calorie, low-nutrient products.