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The science behind your morning cereal and after-dinner cookie could have more in common with a cigarette than most consumers realise, says Michael J Skoler, chief executive officer of Sokolove Law. In this opinion piece, he explores how formulation expertise migrated from 'Big Tobacco' into the food industry, and why that history is now central to a growing wave of litigation.

There is a moment, well-documented in neuroscience, when the brain's reward circuitry is activated by a product specifically engineered to trigger it.

For decades, that moment was understood primarily in the context of nicotine. Increasingly, it is being studied in the context of breakfast.

Same science, different product

The neurological mechanisms that make cigarettes difficult to quit are biological constants, features of the human brain that can be engaged by any stimulus calibrated precisely enough to reach them. What food scientists discovered is that the right ratio of sugar, fat and salt can activate the same dopaminergic pathways that nicotine exploits. This is not a coincidence; it is lineage.

When tobacco companies acquired their way into the food industry, they did not merely purchase brands. They transferred institutional knowledge, laboratory infrastructure and a consumer manipulation methodology refined over decades.

Understanding that lineage is now essential context for anyone watching the emerging wave of ultra-processed food litigation.

Big tobacco buys a seat at the breakfast table

The acquisitions are a matter of public record. In 1985, Philip Morris purchased General Foods for $5.8 billion, absorbing Post cereals, Jell-O and Maxwell House. Three years later, it acquired Kraft for $12.9 billion, which became the largest non-oil acquisition in US corporate history at the time.

When the Kraft-Nabisco merger followed, Oreo entered the Philip Morris empire. On a parallel track, RJ Reynolds, founder of the R J Reynolds Tobacco Company, acquired Nabisco Brands for $4.9 billion in 1985, placing cigarette executives in operational control of Ritz crackers, Chips Ahoy and dozens of other snack staples.

What the historical summary often misses is the nature of the integration. These were not passive holding structures. Tobacco parent companies had built some of the most sophisticated consumer behaviour research operations in the world, focused on a single question: how do you make a product people cannot stop using?

When they acquired food divisions, that research infrastructure came with them. A 2026 study in the American Journal of Public Health documented how tobacco-affiliated food divisions applied behavioural science to product development in ways that would have been unusual in the independent food industry of the same era.

The formulation science

The concept most cited in ultra-processed food engineering is the 'bliss point,' the precise calibration of sugar, fat and salt at which palatability peaks. At that threshold, the product is maximally pleasurable, and the body's satiety signals are suppressed rather than activated.

Sandwich cookies like Oreos are engineered to hit this exact sugar-to-fat ratio. Cereals are formulated with glycaemic profiles that produce rapid glucose spikes and accelerated hunger, driving repeat consumption and habitual purchasing.

The parallel to nicotine delivery engineering is direct. Both disciplines are going for the same goal: finding the threshold at which a product overrides the body's natural stop signals. In tobacco, that signal is discomfort and nausea. In food, it is satiety. In both cases, the commercial objective is its suppression.

The mechanisms are documented across peer-reviewed literature in nutritional biochemistry, neuroscience and behavioural economics. What is newer is their application in a legal context.

What internal research may eventually show

The defining evidentiary turn in tobacco litigation was a key research document. When internal research materials became available through litigation and congressional inquiry, they showed that companies had internal awareness of addiction mechanisms that their public positions flatly denied.

That gap between what they knew and what they said became the foundation for fraud and suppression claims, producing some of the largest civil settlements in American legal history.

Food litigation attorneys are operating on an analogous hypothesis that internal R&D records at major processed food companies will show documented awareness of overconsumption dynamics and deliberate formulation strategies designed to exploit them. Areas of anticipated focus include targeting of children and lower-income consumers, and the use of behavioural research to optimise products for habitual use.

A May 2026 expert panel report from Healthy Eating Research underscored that current regulatory frameworks have not kept pace with the science, a gap that litigation has historically been called upon to address.

The litigation parallel is more than metaphor

The attorneys bringing ultra-processed food cases largely come from tobacco, opioid and pharmaceutical litigation, applying proven frameworks to a new product category. The legal theories in play are recognisable from prior mass tort dockets, which include failure to warn, deceptive health and wellness marketing, product design liability and predatory targeting of children.

Corporate knowledge is the crux, as it was with tobacco. Courts are still working through foundational questions, such as what causation standard applies when harm is gradual and mediated by consumer choice?

A 2025 analysis noted that causation standards applied in early cases, like Martinez v Kraft Heinz, represent just one of several emerging defence approaches – a signal that the litigation has not yet found its settled shape.

But the structural conditions that preceded major tobacco verdicts are visibly assembling. Accumulating scientific consensus, a motivated plaintiffs' bar and early discovery producing documents are just some of the key elements of this litigation.

What the food and beverage industry should be watching

The tobacco precedent is instructive as a timeline warning. The science establishing tobacco's harms preceded legal accountability by decades. The ultra-processed food conversation is accelerating far faster, driven by social media, a scientifically literate public and a post-pandemic focus on metabolic health.

For industry stakeholders, the question is not whether scrutiny will deepen, but how quickly regulatory and legal frameworks will catch up to the existing science.

Companies proactively engaged with reformulation, transparent labelling and honest marketing will be in a fundamentally different position than those managing the issue defensively.

The shared science between cookies, cereals and cigarettes is not a theory. It is a documented institutional history with a traceable evidentiary record and active legal implications that the food and beverage industry can no longer afford to treat as a distant concern.