May 2021

Profit Over Justice: Why PepsiCo Pouring Rights Violate UC Berkeley’s Campus Values

This 2021 report by the the Department of Unsustainable Partnerships under ASUC Senator Sarah Bancroft’s Office shares an in-depth analysis of UC Berkeley’s partnership with PepsiCo. Read the full report here.

February 2020

A Report on Beverage Logo Advertising and Availability on the UC Berkeley Campus

In 2019 Joyce Lee, master’s student in Public Health, led a project to analyze the campus beverage environment through two lenses: beverage logos advertising and beverage product availability. The research focused on areas of campus under the exclusive pouring rights contract with PepsiCo. The results show that 67% of beverage logo advertisements and 56% of product availability were sugar-sweetened beverages. Read the full report here.

January 2020

Shaking up UC Berkeley’s Beverage Service

Lindsey Pfeiffer was a student in the fall 2019 case design course on the future of UC Berkeley’s beverage course. Read about her experience in this blog post.

December 2019

Proposals for the Future of UC Berkeley’s Beverage Service

In fall 2019, ten interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate students participated in a case design course to envision the next 5–10 years of beverage service at UC Berkeley, for after the current contract with PepsiCo expires in 2021. The class was taught by Rosalie Z. Fanshel, program manager at the Berkeley Food Institute. It challenged students to think at the intersection of health and business: considering human and planetary health—and health equity—together with short- and long-term financial costs and benefits and corporate responsibility.

The case design course had two overarching goals. The first was pedagogical: to use the UC Berkeley campus as a living lab to explore food systems concepts that students can then apply at-scale to a wide variety of problems throughout their future work. Simultaneously, the project furthered the Coalition for Healthy Campus Food and Beverages’ goal of expanding participation in—and thus championing a democratic process for—campus decision-making on food and beverage choices.

See the course syllabus here.

The students designed two proposals: one that included a pouring rights contract, with any vendor(s); and one that did not rely on a pouring rights contract. See the final proposals here:

• Contracts team presentation
• Contracts team supplemental materials
• No contracts team presentation
• No contracts team supplemental materials

Overview: Coalition for Healthy Campus Food and Beverages

65,000 people eat and drink at UC Berkeley every day. Our food and beverage choices matter. UC Berkeley’s longtime leadership in values-based procurement has us now looking more closely at the presence of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) on campus. SSBs are the largest source of added sugar in the American diet, and their consequences are a matter of health equity. SSBs are the leading dietary item that has been shown to contribute to obesity. Furthermore, SSBs increase risk of tooth decay and life-threatening diet-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. Just 1-2 servings/day of SSBs increases risk of type 2 diabetes by 26%. Simultaneously, the beverage industry spends billions of dollars every year on marketing SSBs, targeting low income people and people of color, who already bear a disproportionate burden of diet-related disease. In fact, 1 in 2 Latinx Americans and African Americans are projected to get diabetes in their lifetime, compared to 1 in 3 non-Hispanic white Americans.

The Coalition for Healthy Campus Food and Beverages was formed to bring more stakeholders into campus decision-making on food and beverage choices, uplift Berkeley values through procurement practices, and raise awareness of human and planetary health in the process. At UC Berkeley, we are in year eight of a 10-year exclusive pouring rights contract with PepsiCo for beverage service across Cal Dining dining halls and retail outlets, student housing, campus vending machines, athletics concessions, and special events. The contract provides annual sponsorship of $1.3 million (0.05% of the annual campus budget of $2.8 billion) as operational funds to the Associated Students of the University of California, Department of Intercollegiate Athletics, Recreational Sports, and the Residential and Student Services Program, as well as $40,000 in product donations, and $235,000 in funding to market PepsiCo’s own products.

The Coalition for Healthy Campus Food and Beverages recognizes that SSBs and many of the companies that market them are responsible for various negative health and sustainability impacts, from aggressively marketing SSBs to children of color, to funding biased studies, to actively undermining public health efforts and policies to address health implications associated with SSBs.

Founding members of the Coalition for Healthy Campus Food and Beverages include: Berkeley Food Institute, UC Berkeley School of Public Health, UCANR Nutrition Policy Institute, University Health Services – Be Well at Work, Health Promotion – University Health Services, BFI Undergraduate Council, Food@Haas, Basic Needs Security Committee, FoodInno, FEED (Food, Equity, Entrepreneurship, and Development), Net Impact Berkeley, and Berkeley Student Food Collective. 

Goals

The Coalition for Healthy Campus Food and Beverages promotes a healthy campus culture by:

1. Championing a democratic process for campus decision-making on food and beverage choices.
2. Uplifting UC Berkeley values by advancing corporate responsibility with food and beverage vendors.
3. Raising awareness of the impacts of sugar-sweetened beverages on human and planetary health.
4. Expanding the reach of the UC Berkeley Food and Beverage Choices Policy.
5. Finding viable, creative solutions to ensuring vital financial support to UC Berkeley programs that are currently funded through any contracts that do not align with UC Berkeley’s Principles of Community.  

2019 Activities

In 2019 the Coalition for Healthy Campus Food and Beverages:

1. Worked with relevant campus administrative bodies to ensure that any committees that will determine the future of campus beverage service (e.g., through RFPs or contracts) include faculty and staff experts in nutrition, health equity, environmental sustainability, and corporate responsibility, as well as undergraduate and graduate students.
2. Hosted a Healthy Campus Food and Beverages Innovation Challenge April 26 and 27, 2019, to draw on our extensive campus expertise through a hackathon-style event to address the question: How can we uplift UC Berkeley values by advancing corporate responsibility with food beverage vendors while simultaneously finding viable, creative solutions to ensuring vital financial support to UC Berkeley programs? This process was continued through the Coalition for Healthy Campus Food and Beverages Fall 2019 Case Design Course which is taught by Rosalie Z. Fanshel, Program Manager at the Berkeley Food Institute. 
3. Continued to research and expand understanding of the current product mix and promotion of beverages available on campus.

Interested in getting more involved? We invite you to join the Coalition for Healthy Campus Food and Beverages meetings. For more information contact: Rosalie Z. Fanshel, Program Manager, Berkeley Food Institute, rzfanshel@berkeley.edu, or Joyce Lee, Campus Food Equity and Inclusion Policy Fellow, at jmhlee@berkeley.edu.

Download the printer-friendly summary report of 2019 activities here.