This study aimed to map and analyse the UPF industry’s global network of corporate interest groups. Such groups are funded and coordinated by the UPF industry to implement and drive its lobbying and other political activities. Our findings reveal several key features of this global influence network. First, a small number of UPF corporations, including Nestlé, The Coca-Cola Company, Unilever, PepsiCo, Danone, Mars, Mondelez International, and Ferrero are core to the network in terms of most memberships, and are therefore likely to play the leading role in coordinating the UPF industry’s transnational political activities. Second, the corporate interest groups involved in the network are diverse, addressing different regulatory issues and functions across multiple UPF supply chain sectors in the global food system. Third, the network is multi-level, and multi-jurisdictional, spanning global, regional and national levels, with interest groups present in a large number of the UPF industry’s leading country markets. Fourth, the UPF industry’s global influence network has evolved over time, with many interest groups founded from the 1990s onwards, through most recently, an increase in powerful multistakeholder corporate interest groups. These phases coincide with the time periods described in the literature on food regimes, evidenced by large increases in numbers and specific types of interest groups founded over time have occurred. In the section below we discuss the implications of these findings for GFG, food systems transformation, and global policy actions to attenuate the harms of UPFs.

Our analysis suggests that leading global UPF corporations heavily invest resources and effort to build and maintain a network of corporate interest groups. For instance, we found that the top 10 leading UPF corporations have on average 99.5 connections within the identified UPF corporate influence network, with the top 5– PepsiCo, Nestlé, The Coca-Cola Company, Kraft Heinz, and Unilever– averaging 127.8 connections. This high number of membership connections indicates the value these leading UPF corporations give to creating and maintaining an UPF corporate influence network, especially given the total costs which are spent on membership fees [28] in the hope of protecting against ‘business risks’ [62, 63] which may impact profit making. Research suggests that it is not uncommon for leading global UPF corporations to spend tens of millions of dollars in fees to lobby groups or industry associations to support their economic, political, and policy interests [39, 64], for, in return, it is expected that favorable political and policy environments for profiteering are maintained or developed. The cost-benefit of these fees and resources to the UPF industry is clearly worth the investment, considering that the UPF industry’s corporate influence network, has effectively employed tactics to obstruct regulatory policies that may impact profit making abilities [22, 65,66,67], and has led to UPF corporations becoming some of the largest accumulators of profit and distributors of capital, in the global food system [68].

The existence of a powerful UPF corporate influence network with many functionalities, acting to influence GFG decisions and the global food system activities, raises serious concerns. These concerns relate to both legitimacy issues, and power imbalances and asymmetries that corporate interest group participation creates in specific governance bodies, fora or policy processes by simply having ‘a seat at the table’. This study’s results suggest that the UPF industry’s power and legitimacy is amplified via the UPF industry’s network of corporate interests groups, through the crossover, coverage of, and reach into the multilateral food governance system, UN agencies, and other GFG policy and decision-making spaces. To achieve this, UPF corporations strategically engage a wide range of different corporate interest groups, creating a ‘web-like governance structure’ across key components of global food system, with the intention to create influence systemically. The variation in the different types of corporate interest groups identified attest to this, as leading UPF corporations are highly interconnected at the global, regional, and national level, through common interest group memberships. For example, using the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) conceptualization of the global food system [69, 70], we see in Fig. 3 that the UPF corporate influence network extends into all components of the system, including the drivers (e.g.: general business and trade; lobbying, legal and public relations), food supply chains (e.g.: primary production, processing and ingredients; general food industry etc.), food environments (e.g.: food manufacturing and retail), consumer behaviors (e.g.: branding and advertising; specialized nutrition and baby food; research and science communication), and policy and governance (e.g.: sustainability/CSR/MSI etc.), an area which was, until recently, predominantly state led and controlled [71]. Indeed, significant crossover due to the interconnectedness of the current global food system exists, however, this impact and coverage across the food system, likely bolsters the growing structural power of major UPF corporate actors, akin to having influence over the ‘rules of the game’. The importance of this with respect to GFG and the food systems transformation agenda according to political economy scholars, is that this type of structural power, confers UPF corporations the ability to ‘circumvent laws and regulations’, to effectively operate ‘above’ the nation state at a ‘supranational level’ [5].

Over time, there have been three distinct increases in the overall number of interest groups within the UPF industry’s corporate influence network, which is consistent with the characteristics of Food Regime Theory proposed by Friedmann and McMichael. Food Regime Theory was first introduced by Friedmann [72] and then described by both in their seminal 1989 paper as: the First - ‘colonial food regime’ (1870–1930 s); the Second - ‘mercantile-industrial food regime’ (1950–1970 s); and the Third -‘corporate-environmental food regime’ (1980s-present) [73]. Literature on food regimes suggests that it offers both a framework which helps us to understand how agriculture has impacted and shaped global development and capitalism [72], and political economy/ecology more broadly [74], in addition to being a methodological tool to structure historical global food system analysis [75]. It is also important to note when discussing food regimes, that the current period has been built on, and redescribed, by McMichael as the ‘corporate food regime’ [76] and Friedmann as ‘green capitalism’ [77]. In explaining the political economy of food regimes, McMichael notes, that although each period provisioned ‘cheap food and food products’ globally, in the case of the ‘industrial’ and ‘corporate’ (second and third) food regimes, a major outcome of these periods has seen food become both ‘reconstituted products’ (i.e., UPFs) and abstracted from its organic relationship with humans [78]. When combined, our results support both McMichael’s and Friedmann’s interpretations, especially when we consider that UPF aligned, sustainability focussed, CSR, multistakeholder interest groups have become the leading ‘support actors’ in GFG, including the multilateral food governance system, for UPF corporations seeking to maintain and further expand UPF systems throughout the world. A recent example of this was the UN Food Systems Summit, where the leadership sought to limit the direct participation of UPF corporations, yet, they were indirectly represented through multistakeholder interest groups and other organizations that are partners and/or have shared interests [79, 80].

We also show through the analysis of headquarter locations, that the US and EU, and more specifically the cities of Washington DC, New York, Brussels, and Geneva are important power centers for the UPF industry’s corporate influence network, suggesting it is potentially where political, economic, and decision-making power in both the global food and UPF system resides. Building this link between the UPF system political economy, global governance structures, and GFG decision making, this finding reinforces how important the founding of (or revitalizing of) several global governance institutions in the mid-1940s (e.g.: World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) and the 1990s (e.g.: European Union, World Trade Organization) have been for not only establishing dominant US and EU positions in GFG [81], but for the expansion of both US and EU domiciled UPF transnational food corporations throughout the world. The impact of the these institutions in GFG has been a critical part of a recent IPES-Food report [82] as well as other scholarship, with the premise being that they have ‘a long history of pursuing close collaboration with the corporate sector through industry partnerships’ [83, 84], and the corporate capture of GFG is increasingly taking place in more visible ways; for example, through PPPs [85], the liberalization of trade [86] and the prioritization of policies which aid US and EU businesses [82, 87]. Given that these localities are in which both these key globalist institutions and the UPF corporate influence network are anchored, this finding helps us understand potentially which trade and investment agreements, policies, and partnerships (e.g.: trade liberalization, PPPs) pushed by these institutions to finance and implement ‘development’ and ‘agricultural projects’ [81, 82] around the world, may have also aided the development of UPF systems globally. And thus, in turn, what potential GFG, policy, and trade changes are needed to address the human and ecological health harms of UPF systems.

We found several instances where corporate interest groups have changed their names and this likely has an impact in GFG spaces also. The relevance of this to this study is that many of these groups have strong and direct links with many large UPF TNFCs [88]. For example, Coca-Cola set up and funded a global network of interest groups, the International Life Sciences Institutes (ILSI) for decades, to conduct research and impact nutrition and public health policy [89]. In recent years, ILSI ‘rebranded’ it’s North American organization to the Institute for the Advancement of Food and Nutrition Sciences (IAFNS). Additionally, further investigation shows that ILSI’s Research Foundation (ILSI RF) has also changed its name to Agriculture & Food Systems Institute (AFSI) as a result of being exposed for being a front group for the UPF industry and its supply chain [90]. Another prominent example is the largest food industry association in Washington, DC., the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which rebranded to the Consumer Brands Association [91].

Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to suggest a comprehensive set of prescriptive ideas or recommendations for managing UPF corporate interest group influence, we propose, based on this papers key findings, that reducing UPF industry political power in GFG, could potentially involve actively delegitimizing the UPF industries preferred multi-stakeholder governance model, and particularly those multistakeholder interest groups, which are UPF corporation aligned. Instead, the establishment of an interconnected, cohesive, new global network of institutions and organisations to mobilize national actors, and country specific policies and actions, potentially could offer a platform and opportunity, to initiate the drawing down of UPF production and consumption. Furthermore, the establishment of such a network is supported by recommendations from recent scholarship on the CDOH, where recommendations include the development of ‘new international organisations and institutional arrangements [92], an overarching ‘international regulatory framework’ and ‘rules for engagement and conflicts of interest’ in all international organisations [93], and a ‘health-in-all policies’ approach [19], which potentially could extend to a ‘public health, and healthy and sustainable food systems first approach’ in all policies recommendation. These potential actions combined also call for a strong, cohesive UN position on managing corporate engagement, to create a global, system wide approach, in all GFG spaces.

This paper has several limitations. First, given the analysis focused on the global level, we chose to exclude the influence network of UPF industry actors at the sub-national level as this level of data were only available for 2 of the 10 seed data UPF industry actor websites. Second, our data is likely not an exhaustive representation of all the lobby groups/associations due to the method of data collection which is limited by both the keywords and search terms used and whether the associations chose to disclose members on their publicly available websites and reports. Several examples demonstrate this. One, some UPF industry and corporate influence network members pages were ‘locked’ to only members and required login details to access, particularly those associated with primary production and agri-business. Another example is from a recent study on the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, which showed that it has many financial ties to the world’s largest UPF corporations [39], yet we were unable to locate these disclosures, links, or memberships on their website. Third, we acknowledge that this analysis does not provide a complete picture of the entire UPF system as we chose not to include financial actors (i.e., banks, development banks, credit card corporations, accountant firms, investment fund managers etc.), small and medium business, and sub-national and local level actors in the data collection process. However, we recognize that these actors are a major component of the UPF corporate influence network. Finally, we recorded ‘membership’ as it was reported on company websites at the time of data collection, and hence this may not represent actual membership at the time of publication, nor can we validate the accuracy of content sourced from these websites.