Big Soda Wants to Turn MAGA Against MAHA. Here’s How the Oil & Gas Industry Fits In.

MAGA influencers hired by a firm that promotes “anti-woke” movies. The obscure research group Lee Zeldin was working for when he was picked to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. A “pink-slime” media outlet backed by right-wing billionaires Leonard Leo and Charles Koch.

All feature in a new Guardian investigation published in partnership with Fieldnotes that reveals a coordinated campaign being waged by major soda and snack-food corporations hoping to pit Donald Trump's MAGA faithful against Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s “Make America Healthy Again” movement. The companies’ immediate goal: stymie the MAHA-led effort to curb how much ultra-processed food and soda Americans eat and drink.

You can read the full investigation over at The Guardian, which details the network of hired guns the soda and snack industry has turned to for help. But given Fieldnotes is an oil & gas watchdog, you may be wondering why we spent time and effort digging deep into Big Soda and Big Snack. (It wasn’t just because it revealed a sprawling network of for-hire pollsters, strategists, and political money men, though that didn’t hurt.)

The very short answer: Plastics and the petrochemicals they are made from.

Food and beverage manufacturers rely on the former to cheaply package their products; oil & gas companies see the latter as a financial lifeline in a world trying to slowly wean itself off its reliance on fossil fuels for power generation and transportation. The International Energy Agency estimates petrochemicals will become the primary source of global oil demand growth next year—and that the industry will consume one in every six barrels of oil globally by the end of the decade. Single-use-plastic business as usual, then, benefits both the soda and snack companies and the oil & gas industry—people and the planet, not so much.

It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that so many of the players involved in the influence campaign we uncovered—the companies funding it, the trade groups leading it, the for-hire operatives carrying it out, even the right-wing ideologues helping in their own, less direct ways—have ties to the oil & gas industry. A few highlights:

• The two trade groups leading the effort, the American Beverage Association and the Consumer Brands Association, regularly collaborate with oil, gas, and petrochemical interests. AmBev, for example, is formally allied with the American Chemistry Council, the leading chemical lobby, while CBA proudly boasts ExxonMobil, the largest oil & gas company in the United States, as one of its top supporters and closest allies. Both AmBev and CBA are also members of the Recycling Leadership Council, an industry-led group that champions chemical recycling, an unproven-at-scale technology being pushed by petrochemical and plastics companies despite inherent limitations acknowledged by insiders. (Of note to Fieldnotes completists: AmBev also works closely with a plastic trade group that was the subject of one of our first investigations—the one with a Dennis Quaid cameo.) 
   
• Together, AmBev and CBA represent a wide swath of food and beverage corporations, including: Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft-Heinz, Mondelēz, and Nestlé, all of which are funders of The Recycling Partnership alongside Exxon, chemical giants like Dow and Eastman, and the Plastics Industry Association. The partnership advocates for states to pass industry-friendly Extended Producer Responsibility legislation that does not address plastic production or use, only waste. 
   
• Tyson Group, the ostensibly independent polling shop where all five of its publicly listed employees also work for a much larger and more prominent GOP operation, has previously worked for the Consumer Energy Association, a fossil-fuel front group that has received funding from major oil & gas trade groups including the American Petroleum Institute and American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers. 
   
• The Center Square, a journalistically dubious “pink slime” media outlet that amplified the soda industry’s talking points, is run by the Franklin Foundation, which has received substantial funding from Donors Trust, Leonard Leo’s primary dark-money vehicle, and is part of the State Policy Network of conservative think tanks backed by Leo and the Koch family. As Fieldnotes has documented, Leo and Koch have funded the right-wing attacks on what is known as ESG, the investing strategy that takes into consideration environmental, social, and governance issues and that poses a threat to fossil fuel companies. 
   
• Public Opinion Strategies, contracted by AmBev to conduct polling it would later use to lobby state officials, has also worked for Alliance Defending Freedom, the right-wing Christian legal group connected to Leo’s attack on ESG investing, as well as a number of oil & gas interests including the American Chemistry Council, the American Petroleum Institute, and ExxonMobil. 

There’s also another, less obvious connection to a previous Fieldnotes investigation: Lee Zeldin’s ethics paperwork. This time, it revealed Zeldin briefly led an obscure firm later involved in the soda campaign; last time, it revealed Zeldin was getting paid by both sides of the ESG fight. 

Meanwhile, the soda-and-snack lobbying push has occurred as signs of tension continue to emerge within the Trump administration between RFK Jr, who—when not making it more difficult for Americans to get vaccinated—has promised to end corporate influence on public policy, and the far more industry-friendly wing of the administration, where Zeldin and other cabinet officials have stocked their agencies with corporate lobbyists who spent their careers pushing to ease regulations on many of the same industries the MAHA movement, including Kennedy, blames for poisoning American children. 

Last month, the RFK-led MAHA Commission released its second government report, which focused far less on corporate cronyism than the first and did not propose any new restrictions on ultra-processed foods, disappointing many MAHA proponents. The commission bears the name of the movement, but it also includes Zeldin and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins as members, and other Trump officials like Nancy Beck and Kailee Tkacz Buller were involved in the commission’s work, according to federal records. Beck worked at the American Chemistry Council before her first stint at Trump's EPA, while Buller represented SNAC International, another major snack-food trade group, and several other ag interests before joining Rollins at USDA.