Three Bay Area cities including San Francisco, Oakland, and Albany in California passed ballots in yesterday’s election that will institute a penny-per-ounce tax on distributors of sugary drinks.
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And the week isn’t over. The tax would apply to energy, sweetened tea and sports drinks, but not to diet sodas.
Together, they represent a huge blow to the soda industry, which spent more than $30 million combined to defeat Tuesday’s measures.
The three San Francisco Bay Area cities join their neighbor Berkeley, which was the first USA city where voters approved a tax on sugary drinks.
The industry had said such taxes unfairly single out beverages for fueling obesity, and that grocers would be forced to raise prices on other items to cover the cost.
To make that change, the agency has called for all sodas and fruit juices to be 20 per cent more expensive for consumers. Another study from the UC Berkeley team, which surveyed about 2,700 people, including residents of low-income neighborhoods, found that consumption of sugary drinks fell 21% in Berkeley after the tax took effect. Many consumers are switching to bottled water, which could surpass soda consumption in the USA for the first time this year.
Where sugary drink taxes emerge, so too does big money. The beverage industry said the study was flawed.
Though beverage producers claimed that soda taxes would do little to cut consumption, however, market surveys showed that Mexicans reduced their purchases of sugar-sweetened beverages by an average of 6 per cent in 2014 per household. “They will be hurt most by this regressive tax, as will small businesses”. As Margot Sanger-Katz at The New York Times wrote previous year, the American Beverage Association has often used that excuse to argue that obesity won’t decline by implementing soda taxes.
Joe Arellano, a spokesman for the no on HH, V and O1 campaign, said “we respect the voters’ decisions”.
“The movement has caught fire”, Maa said, noting that the millions spent by billionaire and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to pass the soda taxes was a game-changer.
Voters in San Francisco, California on Tuesday passed a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, according to unofficial results.
Caught in the crosshairs in Boulder, though, are Dunn and many others who not only would prefer not to be taxed, but who are offended by the fact that the tax impacts their products at the same rate it does Coke and Pepsi.
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In Illinois, Cook County’s board of commissioners on Thursday is expected to vote on a one-penny per ounce tax to cover an area of Chicago and its suburbs where about five million people live. In Boulder, about 55 percent voted for the tax, according to the latest figures. It was also announced by the Mayor of Oakland, Libby Schaaf that almost $2 million was raised by Berkeley measure for the health and nutrition programs. In Mexico, for example, a roughly 10% tax was imposed on the industry back in January 2014. By 2018, US nutrition panels on food and beverage packaging must list how many grams of caloric sweeteners manufacturers added and the daily recommended maximum.
