No soda or juice to be offered with kids meals in California

New law going into effect Jan. 1 aims to cut back on children’s sugar consumption

SANTA CRUZ >> Milk or water.

Come January, those will be the only two drinks California restaurants can offer as standard kids meal choices under a bill signed into law Sept. 20 by Gov. Jerry Brown.

The bill, SB 1192, was authored by state Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel, who represents the Central Coast from north of Santa Cruz south past San Luis Obispo. Its success marks Monning’s biggest legislative victory in his longtime campaign to cut back on the sugar consumption of children.

“We think it’s an important step forward in both education of parents and children and also having the marketplace prioritize more healthful beverages for meals that are marketed to children,” Monning said in an interview with the Santa Cruz Sentinel last week.

More than 40 percent of California children drank at least one sugary beverage per day in 2014, according to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, a habit that researchers have shown drastically increases a child’s risk of obesity and diabetes.

Restaurants will still be able to serve soda or juice with kids meals on request, but those sweetened drinks can no longer be advertised, or listed, as part of any combo meal intended for children. Sparkling water and unsweetened flavored water are permitted, as is a nondairy milk alternative.

Restaurants will have to make the switch by Jan. 1 or face fines up to $500 for repeated violations, with enforcement left to county health departments.

Cities including San Francisco, Berkeley and Davis have similar ordinances on the books, as does Santa Clara County.

The bill was widely backed by national and state health organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Cancer Society and Public Health Advocates.

But its opponents, a handful of Republican lawmakers, have said the decision is better left in the hands of parents and criticized the bill as a government overreach.

Flojaune Cofer, Public Health Advocates’ director of State Policy and Research, disputed that parents lose any choice.

“We have retained the right for parents, at no additional cost, to say I don’t want the default drink I want something else,” Cofer said.

What it does prevent, Cofer said, is forcing parents to say no to an unhealthy option — something that she said can be harder for low-income parents. As more and more meals are eaten outside of the home, those little decisions have larger impacts, she said.

Cofer said she expects to see a noticeable dip in children’s sugary beverage consumption as a result of the new law.

Facing mounting pressure from children’s health advocates, some national fastfood chains have already dropped sodas from their kids meals — among them, McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Dairy Queen and Jack in the Box. But most large restaurant chains continued to market soft drinks on their kids menus, according to a July 2017 report by the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

McDonald’s, one of the nation’s largest fast-food chains, now offers a choice between apple juice or milk with its Happy Meals. But even though the apple juice contains no added sugar, it would be banned as a standard choice starting in 2019.

McDonald’s did not respond to a request for comment.

Monning, the Central Coast state senator, tried twice to pass a statewide tax on sugary drinks as an assemblyman — taxes that he said would have raised $1.9 billion annually for public health and public health education.

And in the Senate, he has twice put forward bills that would have required additional label warnings for sugary drinks.

Each proposal came up short after strong opposition from the beverage industry, but Monning said this time he was able to find a legislative lever that the industry could not publicly oppose.

“Even the soda industry sees a limit to how strongly they can advocate for forcing their poison onto children,” Monning said. “They know there’s an adverse health impact. They won’t acknowledge it, but they couldn’t in good conscience face media scrutiny by arguing that children should have a mandatory inclusion of a sugar-sweetened beverage in their children’s meal.”

Instead, the beverage industry focused efforts this year on another front: Successfully pushing through a 12-year moratorium on local soda taxes in July, leveraged by a ballot initiative seen as more permanently damaging to city’s finances.

Days after Brown signed the moratorium, the California Dental Association and California Medical Association jointly filed their own ballot initiative for 2020 to create a statewide soda tax. Similar to Monning’s earlier proposals, that initiative would raise about $1.7 billion for public health programs by levying a 2-cent-per-fluid-ounce tax on sugary-sweetened drinks.