CSPI advocated for a comprehensive policy portfolio in these areas:

• Strengthening the nutrition and public health benefits of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
• Supporting free healthy school lunch and breakfast for all students.
• Ensuring that the nation’s largest restaurant chains offer healthy options for kids.
• Improving transparency through front-of-package labels on packaged foods that are high in added sugar, salt and saturated fat.
• Nudging customers towards healthier choices at restaurants by using warning icons on menu items that are high in salt and added sugar.  
• Fighting digital marketing of harmful products to kids and promoting healthy food and drinks in grocery store displays, such as at checkouts, end-of-aisle, and at store entrances.
• Supporting values aligned food purchasing and procurement for public institutions and jurisdictions.
• Greater support for the nutritional quality of food distributed via food banks.

Over the course of the last five years, we adjusted our strategies and approach based on learnings, political feasibility, community partnership, and feedback.

For example, in 2022 based on the political and economic climate due to the Covid-19 pandemic and input from SNAP participants and stakeholders, we shifted the focus of the SNAP portfolio towards increasing access and benefits and exploring more equitable ways to strengthen the nutrition and public health impacts of SNAP. This proved prescient when these benefits came under assault in the second Trump administration.

CSPI did not just advance new policies — we defended existing ones

• In 2020, CSPI successfully sued the USDA in federal district court to challenge the agency’s 2018 rollbacks of school meal nutrition standards on sodium, whole grains, and flavored milk  
• Strengthened SNAP during the Biden administration by successfully advocating for increases in the maximum benefit in response to the pandemic-induced hunger crisis and updates to the Thrifty Food Plan to better reflect the cost of a nutritious diet, resulting in 42 million Americans having better access to nutritious food. Unfortunately, in July 2025, the current Trump administration reversed these provisions in part and made further cuts to SNAP access and benefits.  
• Built support for national free school meals for all children during the pandemic which Congress authorized in March 2020, but it regrettably ended in 2022. With our support, nine states subsequently passed and implemented healthy free school meals for all policies.

Holding industry accountable

Corporations have an outsized influence on individuals’ ability to access and consume healthy foods, but their power should not outweigh public health. CSPI held industry accountable through strategic campaigns leveraging evidence and public pressure, including:    

• Worked in coalition to block the mega-merger of Kroger and Albertsons supermarket chains in 2024. The $25 billion consolidation would have placed more than half of all foods and beverages in the US under the control of two retailers, increased food prices, and depressed employee wages. CSPI met with the Federal Trade Commission to share our concerns and brought the firepower of the National Alliance for Nutrition and Activity (NANA) members to support the Stop the Merger coalition.  
• In 2025, forced five companies, including Coca-Cola and Nestle, to remove ads from YouTube Kids by alerting the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI) that these ads violated voluntary pledges to not advertise food to kids.  
• After an online campaign that generated over 4,000 consumer emails in 2025, Stonyfield Organic agreed to remove all added sugars from the YoBaby yogurt line.

Additional work

• Dollar Store Report (2023)
• Online Grocery Marketing Scorecard Report (2025)  
• Restaurant Kids’ Meals Campaign (2024)
• School Meals Corporate Report Card (2021)
• School Meals Milk Report (2022)
• Competitive Foods in Schools Report (2023)

Power in Partnership & Coalition Building

CSPI’s success has been shaped and strengthened through deep partnerships with state and local organizations through subgrants and capacity building efforts. Through CSPI’s subgranting program, community-based organizations work on community-centered policy campaigns and CSPI provides funding and technical assistance. This approach to partnership evolved as CSPI learned alongside our subgrant partners and placed a greater emphasis on building capacity and examining policies through a health equity lens. This work was influenced by the contextual realities of the time – the first Trump administration, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a national racial reckoning.

In our experience, policies that are responsive to communities’ needs and that have authentic community support are more equitable, better positioned to resist industry opposition, and ultimately lead to better health outcomes. CSPI has made progress in its commitment to increase subgrants to organizations led by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).  In the first round of subgranting just 11 percent of organizations awarded grants identified as being led by BIPOC but in subsequent rounds over 40 percent of organizations awarded grants identified as such. CSPI supported the following:  

• Over 150 trainings, presentations, and panels through the Resource Hub — a responsive space for learning and innovation for both grantees and external partners.  
• The development and dissemination of eight toolkits to support policy advocacy.  
• Three convenings for subgrant partners to develop skills and engage in peer learning and networking. Read more about a subgrantee’s insights from the 2025 convening here.    
• Inaugural Powerbuiding cohort: Dedicated funding to build the advocacy capacity of organizations led by and serving people with racialized and/or minoritized identities—through technical assistance and space for peer organizations to connect and learn in community, from community.        
• Led advocacy efforts through 50 coalitions including the National Alliance for Nutrition and Activity Coalition – with over 520 national, state, and local partners working on shared goals.

The continuing growth and inter-campaign synergies between CSPI-funded work in New York State has allowed for more effective legislative and community engagement at all levels.

— Interfaith Public Health Network

Formative research and policy evaluation leads to effective policy

Formative research is often critical to informing advocacy, especially when trying to pass novel policies. To this end, CSPI engaged in formative research to help inform policy advocacy and co-authored 30 studies. Additionally, we partnered with researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) to evaluate policies passed to understand their impact and inform future policy advocacy strategy. Highlights include:  

• Formative research provided the evidence to inform recommendations for FDA’s proposed FOPNL rule. CSPI initiated and guided nine academic studies to directly compare FDA’s proposed “Nutrition Info box” with a novel “high in” label design and found the “high in” design is far more effective.
• An evaluation of the Healthy Retail Checkout Ordinance in Berkeley, California found that this policy resulted in an increase in compliant, healthier products in checkout facings.
• An evaluation of changes to nutrition standards in the CFBAI showed that children’s exposure to food advertising on television fell substantially from 2013 to 2022.  However, both children and adolescents continued to see over 1,000 food-related ads per year, and the majority of advertised products remained high in added sugars, saturated fat or sodium. Evidence suggested that companies are targeting youth via digital media, which UIC is currently studying further. The results of this study will lay the groundwork for future regulations.

Continuing the journey

CSPI is committed to building on the lessons learned since 2020 and advancing our shared goals with partners and funders to develop evidence-based, community-informed food and nutrition strategies that improve our food environment, increase access to healthy foods, and ultimately aim to reduce rates of diet-related diseases. Yet, CSPI’s work is far from over, and we continue to look for new partners and advocates to join us in supporting these critical efforts to protect and promote public health. Energized by a groundswell of support for food and nutrition policies across the nation, we have an opportunity to connect with an even wider audience of people and push for policy change at all levels of the government and with corporations. CSPI’s proven track record and expertise in policy development, campaigning, science and research, coalition building, litigation, and corporate engagement are evidence that we are well-positioned to navigate the ever-changing political environment and Make America Healthy Again movement.