According to an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Kraft is splitting into two publicly-traded companies – one that will manage its snack foods business, and another that will manage its North American grocery store business.

Aside from the Kraft brand itself, the company owns a number of the most popular food brands in the U.S., including Cadbury, Maxwell House, Jell-O, Oreos, and others.

As a major food producer in the United States, Kraft’s business is affected by agriculture policy, food safety regulations, trade policy, and other government activity and regulations. Kraft spends a lot of money on the political process and focuses on policy issues that affect its interests. Here’s a sample of where its money goes:

• Kraft’s employees and its PAC spent $951,016 on campaign contributions in 2009-10, 55% of which went to Democrats.
• Kraft spent $6.4 million on lobbying in 2009-10. One bill they lobbied on included the Safe and Efficient Transportation Act of 2009, which would have increased the weight limit for freight trucks, allowing them to transport more in one load, and would have also provided money to repair bridges, presumably because of the increased stress caused by heavier trucks. The bill did not become law.
• Two other bills Kraft lobbied on, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act and the Food Safety Enhancement Act, would have increased federal authority over the food supply and increased the number of inspections of food processing plants. Both were supported by Kraft and opposed by small food producers, and neither became law.
• Kraft also received $402.06 million in federal government contracts in 2010, most of them for grocery resale.

‘Influence Explored’ takes an article from the day’s headlines and exposes the influential ways of entities mentioned in the article. Names and corporations are run through Sunlight’s influence tracking tools such as Influence Explorer and Transparency Data to remind readers of the money that powers Washington.