California banned four food additives and six artificial dyes, wrote the first U.S. legal definition of ultra processed food, and pulled those rules into school meals. The FDA has since acted on every additive. The playbook is spreading.
The Skittles-shaped pillow on the couch in Jesse Gabriel's Sacramento office started as an inside joke. Critics had labeled one of the assemblyman's food-safety bills a "Skittles ban," and Gabriel, a Democrat from Encino, kept a pillow shaped like the candy to mark the absurdity. According to a June 15, 2026 STAT+ profile by Sarah Todd, the pillow is also a small monument to a much larger shift. The bill that prompted the joke, and the suite of food-safety bills Gabriel assembled around it, helped California become the first U.S. state to write a legal definition of ultra-processed food, the broad industrial-food category researchers link to higher rates of obesity, heart disease, and certain cancers. The state also pulled those foods out of school meals and banned four food additives and six artificial dyes. The FDA has since acted on every additive Gabriel originally targeted.
Gabriel is not a scientist. By his own admission in the STAT+ profile, ultra-processed food "was not on my dance card." That admission is the start of the playbook, not a confession of unpreparedness. The template is recognizable to anyone who has watched California build consumer-protection law for two decades. Find a regulatory gap. Pass a bill that the food industry cannot ignore because California is large enough to set de facto national labels. Wait for the FDA to catch up.
The mechanism is sequencing. The 2024 additive and dye restrictions, the ultra-processed food definition, and the school-meal pullout are not isolated bills. Each one creates a market signal: a banned dye forces reformulation, a defined category gives nutrition researchers and other states a reference point, a school-meal rule changes what the largest school-food buyer in the country will buy. The follow-on effect at the FDA, which has now moved on every additive Gabriel originally targeted, is the measure of how durable the sequence is.
The template has critics, and they are not all on the right. Food and additive manufacturers have framed the laws as overreach, warning of higher grocery costs and supply-chain disruption. Nutrition scientists are split on the ultra-processed food definition itself, which bundles a wide spectrum of industrial formulations under one legal term and treats them as a single public-health problem. School-meal advocates have raised equity concerns about removing defined categories of food from cafeterias, particularly in districts that depend on shelf-stable, low-cost products. And California's role as a de facto national regulator is its own federalism question, since a state can pull a federal agency without ever passing a federal law.
The Skittles pillow is a fitting artifact. By Gabriel's own description in the STAT+ profile, it is an inside joke about a bill that became the first move in a sequence the FDA is still playing out. The open question is not whether the playbook will spread to other states, but whether the FDA will eventually preempt the state definition of ultra-processed food rather than continue to be pulled by it.