It’s a good day to be a kid in Santa Cruz, California. The city has won a court case rejecting an industry attempt to overturn a public vote.

“This ruling affirms the City’s authority as a charter city to implement a thoughtfully crafted local measure that addresses local health concerns, generates local revenue, and was approved by City of Santa Cruz voters,” said City Attorney Cassie Bronson. “We are pleased with the court’s well-reasoned analysis and appreciate the careful consideration given to the legal issues presented in this case.”

The Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Tax was approved by Santa Cruz voters to generate general revenue for the City, with an eye toward funding services and programs that contribute to community health and wellbeing.

The more harm to citizens, the more money the sugar industry made, which was being spent on doing more harm and blocking safety measures. The sugar industry basically argued that predators could not be regulated by victims. Santa Cruz applied a common sense general revenue tax, with proceeds directed toward services and programs that address the public harms from sugar.

To be clear, the sugar industry wrote state law and then sued the city with it, and lost. In 2018 the beverage industry qualified a statewide ballot initiative requiring two-thirds supermajorities for nearly all new local taxes, then withdrew it in exchange for California lawmakers passing a law to preemptively ban local grocery taxes until 2031, including a provision withholding sales tax revenue from any city imposing one even if a court found the tax valid. A 2023 state appeals court ruling struck this bonkers revenue-withholding provision as unconstitutional, which opened the door for Santa Cruz offering a Measure Z.

The plaintiffs against the city were a national association of sugar drink brands, joined by the California Grocers Association, California Hispanic Chambers of Commerce, California Alliance of Family-Owned Businesses, California Chamber of Commerce, and California Fuels and Convenience Alliance They filed suit in May 2025, after the American Beverage Association had poured almost $2 million into their eat-shit-and-die campaign against a tiny city’s local public health measure.

Yudkin, Professor of Nutrition and Dietetics at the
University of London from 1954-1971, published Pure, White and Deadly in 1972 warning of sugar’s role in heart disease and metabolic harm. This is Yudkin’s book Contents from his 1986 edition:

The industry response is well documented: the Sugar Research Foundation’s secretly funded deflection research was exposed in a 2016 JAMA Internal Medicine analysis of internal industry papers. The professional isolation of Yudkin himself is a matter of record in the publication history of his own book, out of print for decades before its 2012 reissue.

Santa Cruz voters were simply doing in 2025 what should have happened in 1975.

Well, there goes my steep discount on perfectly fine food. I often get 30% off or more buying “sell by” dairy products. It’s a strike signal for me, yet for others it’s the opposite. Reducing confusion makes sense when you look at the colossal amount of waste it has generated. And my favorite part of this story is the conclusion.

With no federal regulations dictating what information labels should include, the stamps have led to consumer confusion — and nearly 20% of the nation’s food waste, according to the Food and Drug Administration. In California, that’s about 6 million tons of unexpired food that’s tossed in the trash each year.

Nate Rose, a spokesperson for the California Grocers Association, said some grocers have had to overhaul their labeling systems, but as a whole, the association has been supportive of the change.

The new labels will result in “a win-win where we can reduce food waste and consumers will find these decisions a little bit simpler,” he said, adding that shoppers will still find old labels in stores for months to come as grocers sell through the products that already have them.

He is talking about a stamped exact date as if it’s just a vague process that runs for months on its own. That alone exposes the complete mess of “sell by” label management.