Berkeley’s low-income neighborhoods saw a 21 percent drop in consumption of soda and other sugary drinks in the months after the city introduced a tax of one cent per ounce on such beverages, new research shows.

The findings from the first U.S. city to combat sugar-related health risks and raise revenue with a tax on sugary drinks is encouraging news for the four other cities voting on measures this fall, and for Philadelphia, where a new tax is being implemented.

Two decades after soda taxes were first proposed, we may finally have reached the point where Big Soda’s big money is no longer enough to keep them at bay.  

One of the first highly public calls for taxing sugary drinks and investing the revenue to support education and better nutrition came in a 1994 New York Times Op-Ed by Kelly Brownell. A few years later, the Center for Science in the Public Interest took up the cause with a report, "Liquid Candy: How Sugar Drinks Are Harming America’s Health," at a time when "the prospect of a major U.S. city enacting a soda tax was hardly to be contemplated," as CSPI President Mike Jacobson recalled recently. 

We’re now seeing this once novel idea becoming a reality with the recent successes in Mexico, Berkeley and Philadelphia.  

California’s Bay Area this week has been the epicenter of action to reduce consumption of sugary drinks.  On Tuesday, the same day a federal judge ruled that San Francisco could proceed with requiring warning labels on soda ads, the East Bay city of Albany added a proposed sugary drinks tax to the November ballot.

Albany joins neighboring Oakland in letting voters decide this November whether to follow Berkeley's example with a penny per ounce tax on sugary drinks.  A similar effort is likely to hit the ballot in San Francisco, where supporters and their Board of Supervisors allies are working through a delay caused by a technical error.