Tag Archives: PepsiCo

Ending One Area Of Government Interference Into Private Enterprise

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On Sunday, Townhall posted an article about an attempt by Biden-Harris FTC, Chair Lina Khan to prevent manufacturers from giving better prices to companies that bought their products in bulk. She is now the co-chair of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral transition team. Communism has its rewards.

The article reports:

She loved using a little-known Great Depression law, called the Robinson-Patman Act, to crack down on companies that offered bulk pricing discounts to their customers.

For example, in December 2024, Khan’s agency sued Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits, an alcohol distributor, for giving better deals to national chains like Costco, Total Wine, and Kroger while charging independent liquor stores more for the same products.

Then, on January 17, 2025 — just days before President Trump’s inauguration — her FTC filed a similar suit against PepsiCo over promotional terms that she claimed favored Walmart and other giants over smaller grocers.

These companies weren’t raising prices; they were lowering them. But they still got sued by Biden’s administration through the Robinson-Patman Act.

Robinson-Patman wasn’t written to stop companies from competing on price. That, after all, is the entire point of free enterprise. The act was written to stop companies with real market power from rigging prices with the intention of squeezing out competitors unfairly.

Yet neither of these two Biden administration Robinson-Patman Act cases pointed to a single direct harm consumers faced from this price-cutting.

At the time, then-Commissioner Ferguson called this egregious Biden abuse of power out for what it was. In his January 2025 dissent on the PepsiCo case, he labeled the filing “purely political,” accusing the outgoing Democratic majority of “march[ing] staff into court with no evidence to support the most important allegations in the Complaint.” He called it an “insult to the Commission’s credibility, its hardworking and talented staff,” and “a waste of taxpayer dollars.”

Ferguson was right on target — and when he took the FTC’s reins from Khan once Trump was sworn into office, he dismissed the PepsiCo case.

The article concludes:

Which raises the question: How could the Biden team be so tone-deaf in filing these cases?

Perhaps they have never done their own grocery shopping and thus didn’t understand how we all shop or what we prioritize.

Or — and I fear this might be more likely — perhaps they know exactly what we all do, but they didn’t take that into consideration when filing the cases, because shaping the world to more closely resemble their progressive, anti-capitalist worldview was more important to them than protecting consumer welfare.

Maybe the Biden holdovers tried to take away your Costco deals because they truly hate capitalist business efficiency that much. But Chair Ferguson and the rest of the Trump administration are making sure they won’t succeed. 

If that’s not grounds for a free lifetime Costco membership, then I don’t know what is.

This is very real example of the reason elections matter.

Junk Food Is Becoming Healthier Under Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.!

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On Friday, The Epoch Times posted an article about PepsiCo’s reaction to President Trump’s statement that Coca-Cola will be switching to cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. I am not saying that soda is healthy, but sugar is healthier than high fructose corn syrup. You take your victories where you can!

The article reports:

PepsiCo’s top executive indicated on July 17 that the company may switch Pepsi’s sweetener from high-fructose corn syrup to sugar, one day after President Donald Trump said Coca-Cola would soon be making the change.

“Same journey that we have in foods, we’re following in beverages. This is a consumer-centric strategy. We’re following the consumer,” Ramon Laguarta, PepsiCo’s CEO, told investors on a call after being asked about Trump’s announcement.

“If the consumer is telling us that they prefer products that have sugar and they prefer products that have natural ingredients, we will give the consumer products that have sugar and have natural ingredients. So, this is a journey of following the consumer, trying to be a little bit maybe one step ahead of the consumer, but not too many steps. And it applies to both beverages and food.”

The article notes:

Laguarta’s announcement came during a call in which executives said that PepsiCo will relaunch its Lay’s and Tostitos brands later this year to highlight that they contain no artificial colors or flavors.

“We’re trying to elevate the real food perception of Lay’s. If you think about the simplest and most natural snack, it is a potato chip; it’s a potato, it’s oil, and it’s a little bit of salt—the most simple, no artificial ingredients,” Laguarta said.

The company also said it was expanding the use of avocado and olive oil across its brands, rather than the canola or soybean oil it uses. Some health influencers, including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have promoted removing seed oils from food.

America may soon become the land of healthy junk food!

Taxes Have Consequences

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For some unknown reason, politicians love to spend other peoples’ money. And they love to raise taxes to get more of other peoples’ money to spend. However, raising taxes does not always work–sometimes it has unforeseen consequences. The Laffer Curve taught us that.

Last Friday, Investor’s Business Daily posted an article about the soda tax in Philadelphia. It just hasn’t gone as predicted.

The article reports:

That 1.5 cents per ounce doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is. The Tax Foundation notes that it’s “24 times the Pennsylvania excise tax rate on beer.”

“The high tax rate on nonalcoholic beverages makes them more expensive than beer in some cases,” the nonpartisan think tank wrote.

Some people, suddenly facing absurdly high costs for colas, root beers and other soft drink favorites, are turning to alcohol instead.

Probably not what was envisioned with the tax. And the tax has been put on diet drinks as well as sugared ones. So, if they had hoped to alter people’s consumption away from sugar-filled soda toward less-unhealthy, non-sugared alternatives, it was a failure.

Tax increases never sound like much–they are sold that way. Remember the luxury tax that went into effect in 1991 that nearly killed the boat industry. The tax was only supposed to impact the rich, but it caused a serious recession as the impact of the tax began to trickle down.

The article at Investor’s Business Daily further reports:

“Beverage tax collections were originally promoted as a vehicle to raise funds for prekindergarten education,” the Tax Foundation said, “but in practice Philadelphia awards just 49% of the soda tax revenues to local pre-K programs.” The majority of the money goes to government employees’ benefits and local schools that already have funding.

…the tax didn’t bring in the money the city thought it would. The city budgeted a “conservative” $46.2 million in revenues from the tax for fiscal 2017. At current projections, they’ll come up $6.7 million short. Many people are leaving Philly to do their shopping, while others have switched to other beverages, leaving a big unexpected hole in the tax revenue estimates.

“In July, city officials lowered beverage tax revenue by 14%, leaving the prekindergarten programs that the tax promised to fund in jeopardy,” the study said.

Meanwhile, local Coca-Cola and PepsiCo operations laid off nearly 150 workers and pulled some brands off Philly shelves. And angry local businesses are suing the city over the tax.

Raising taxes is never the answer. Cutting spending usually is.