Beverage Industry Spent $70M Lobbying to Keep $10B SNAP Revenue
Federal lobbying disclosures show the American Beverage Association has spent more than $70 million since 2003 to block congressional restrictions on using food stamps to buy soda — protecting an...
The single most documented fact in the decade-long fight over soda and food stamps is this: the American Beverage Association has filed 449 federal lobbying disclosures and spent more than $70 million since 2003 working to prevent Congress from restricting what Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients can purchase, according to a Legis1 analysis of the Senate lobbying disclosure database. The industry it represents collects an estimated $10 billion per year in SNAP-derived revenue, a figure cited in a 2025 TIME Magazine essay by Arianna Huffington drawing on research by author Murray Carpenter. At that ratio, each lobbying dollar spent has shielded roughly $5,882 in annual protected revenue — a return that explains why the spending has never stopped, even in non-Farm Bill years.
The spending accelerates when policy threatens revenue. In 2013, the year Congress debated the Farm Bill and SNAP reauthorization, the ABA combined with Coca-Cola and PepsiCo to spend $16.2 million in SNAP-related lobbying activity, according to a calculation by author Andrew Fisher published in a peer-reviewed article in PMC — 'Keeping Soda in SNAP: Understanding the Other Iron Triangle' — which cited the Senate's lobbying disclosure database. In 2016, when the USDA was weighing a New York City pilot program waiver, the same three entities together spent $12.2 million lobbying the federal government, including the USDA, according to the same PMC source. The pattern is consistent: legislative or regulatory threat produces a measurable lobbying surge.
The Trump administration's 2025 approval of state-level SNAP restriction waivers produced the most intense response on record. Bloomberg Government, analyzing federal lobbying disclosures, reported that the ABA spent $1.7 million in lobbying in the first half of 2025 alone — more than double its outlay during the same period in 2024 and surpassing the group's annual lobbying total in all but one year since 2010. One discrete component of that spending: an $80,000 payment filed through Torrey Advisory Group in Q4 2025, per Legis1's analysis of Senate disclosure filings. Torrey Advisory Group, a specialized agricultural policy lobbying firm, has been retained by the ABA since 2013, according to Legis1, and is characterized in that analysis as being deployed specifically to 'work agriculture committee skeptics' — meaning members of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees who oversee SNAP.
The campaign finance dimension runs parallel to the lobbying expenditures. Beverage industry political action committees have directed at least $225,000 in contributions to members of the House Agriculture Committee since 2015, according to the PMC article, which cites 'one account' using Federal Election Commission data. The PMC citation does not identify the specific PACs, the specific member recipients, or whether contributions clustered around Farm Bill markup periods or SNAP-related amendment votes — gaps that prevent a complete vote-for-dollar accounting. What the record does establish is that the same industry spending tens of millions to lobby the Agriculture Committee has simultaneously directed campaign funds to the members of that committee.
The corporate response to SNAP restriction proposals has not been limited to trade association proxies. When New York Governor David Paterson and Mayor Michael Bloomberg submitted a request in 2010 for a two-year SNAP pilot program that would restrict soda purchases, the chief executive officers of both Coca-Cola and PepsiCo sent letters to Bloomberg opposing the plan within one day of the request, according to the TIME Magazine essay citing Murray Carpenter's reporting. The episode documents C-suite executive intervention in SNAP waiver policy operating independently from and in parallel with trade association lobbying — a two-track influence architecture. The waiver was denied by the USDA.
A structural financial conflict exists within Congress itself, though its precise contours are difficult to fully document. A Campaign Legal Center review of 2020 financial disclosure reports found that members of Congress disclosed owning between $8.76 million and $35.6 million worth of stock in companies — Coca-Cola explicitly named among them — that were simultaneously lobbying on legislation and contributing to those same members' campaigns. The CLC analysis was conducted in the context of plastic pollution legislation, not SNAP, but congressional stock ownership in Coca-Cola creates a financial interest in any legislation affecting Coca-Cola's revenue, including SNAP purchase restrictions. The CLC report does not identify which specific members hold Coca-Cola stock, nor does it quantify the Coca-Cola-specific portion of the disclosed range — gaps that would require cross-referencing individual member financial disclosure forms at the House Clerk's office or the Senate Ethics Committee.
The beverage industry has also worked through a less visible channel: financial contributions to anti-hunger nonprofit organizations. The PMC article identifies both beverage companies and food retailers as making financial contributions to anti-hunger groups, which have in turn opposed SNAP restrictions on the grounds that they stigmatize low-income consumers and restrict purchasing autonomy. The specific organizations, the dollar amounts of industry contributions to them, and the organizational decision-making that followed those contributions are not documented in available public records reviewed for this analysis. The mechanism — funding third-party advocacy organizations that then lobby on your behalf — is legal and widely practiced, but it obscures the financial origin of opposition arguments that appear to come from the nonprofit sector.
What remains hidden is substantial, and the instruments to reveal it are specific. The $225,000 in PAC contributions to House Agriculture Committee members has not been broken down by recipient member, contributing PAC, or contribution date — information that sits in the FEC's campaign finance database at FEC.gov and could be extracted by querying the ABA PAC, Coca-Cola PAC, and PepsiCo PAC against the current and recent Agriculture Committee membership rosters. The names of individual Torrey Advisory Group lobbyists working on the ABA account, and their prior government employment history, are available in the Senate's Lobbying Disclosure Act filings at lda.senate.gov but have not been publicly compiled. Which specific members of Congress own Coca-Cola or PepsiCo equity, and in what amounts, is a matter of public record in annual financial disclosure filings but has not been cross-referenced against Agriculture Committee membership or SNAP-related votes. And the full scope of sugar industry spending — identified by Bloomberg Government as also ramping up in 2025 but not fully documented in available sourcing — remains an open question. A single FEC database query, a set of LDA filings, and a stack of member financial disclosures would answer most of what the public does not yet know.