Berkeley’s soda tax success story deserves wider attention across California

Before the 2014 election, soda tax campaigns in at least 31 American cities had been defeated by the beverage industry. Richmond and El Monte — cities on opposite ends of the state — tried and lost two years prior, drowned by industry spending and slick “nanny state” messaging.

Then Berkeley voters passed Measure D by a 75% margin, making it the nation’s first tax on the distributors of sugar-sweetened beverages.

More than a decade later, the question is no longer whether a soda tax can pass or whether it works. The question is what a city can build with the revenue. Berkeley has spent years answering that question, and the answer is worth California’s wider attention.

Since 2015, the Healthy Berkeley program has reinvested more than $11.9 million of soda tax revenue into the communities the beverage industry targeted most: Black, Latino, immigrant and lower-income neighborhoods. Roughly $5.7 million has gone to Berkeley Unified School District’s cooking and gardening program, which now reaches more than 40,000 students and parents across 18 school gardens.

The rest has built a community health infrastructure that meets residents at every stage of life.

Toddlers at the YMCA of the East Bay sing songs about which drinks help them grow. Elementary and middle schoolers chop vegetables they grew themselves in school gardens. High schoolers train as water ambassadors with the Ecology Center and run urban agriculture programs through Berkeley Youth Alternatives.

Adults of all ages receive primary care, dental care and trusted health information in their own language at certain clinics. Between 2018 and 2022, the Healthy Berkeley program generated 20,000 primary care and 9,000 dental referrals for residents often overlooked by the health care system.

These investments have changed how Berkeley thinks about its own health. In one survey of 840 people reached by Healthy Berkeley-funded programs, 80% reported a shift in their attitude, interest or intention toward healthier behaviors. Once Berkeley residents understood that sugary drink companies had been unfairly targeting them, they stopped standing for it.

That is not a pricing effect. That is a community organizing itself around its own well-being.

The behavior change is showing up in the data. A 2024 study tracked 44,000 children in California cities with soda taxes against 345,000 children in 40 matched cities without, and found significantly lower body mass index percentiles among kids in tax cities — with the strongest effects in children under 12. The researchers explicitly recommended similar excise taxes as a tool to prevent chronic disease.

The beverage industry understood from the start that this was the threat they could not afford. In 2018, the American Beverage Association brought a $7 million ballot initiative to Sacramento that would have required a two-thirds supermajority for nearly any new local tax, and offered to withdraw it only if the Legislature banned local soda taxes for 12 years. The Legislature capitulated. The Sacramento Bee called it a shakedown. State Sen. Scott Wiener called it “a nuclear weapon” aimed at state and local governments. Fortunately, Berkeley’s tax was grandfathered in. 

Appropriately, in 2023, the California Third District Court of Appeal struck down the law’s penalty provisions in a lawsuit led by Cultiva La Salud and Santa Cruz City councilmember Martine Watkins. In 2024, Berkeley voted to make its tax permanent with 80% support. During the same election, Santa Cruz became the first California city to pass a new soda tax since the preemption deal.

The genie is now out of the bottle.

Other California cities should be paying attention to what Berkeley built. Diabetes rates can bend. Youth BMIs can come down. Trust in local institutions can rise. Community leaders can emerge from the neighborhoods most affected.

Berkeley has been showing us the possibilities for years.