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The comments on the Cheerios Facebook page have become much more positive since the announcement a few days ago that the cereal brand would use only non-genetically-modified ingredients in its original cereal. 

 

Said one:  “Thank you Cheerios for deciding to make your cereal GMO free! I stopped buying it for my family to eat because it wasn’t GMO free but once you have changed it to GMO free I will buy it again because my son especially loved your cheerios! It’s nice to have a brand we can trust again!” 

 

Give us more non-GMO options, requested another. “You need to remove GMOs from all your cereals not just one, We used to buy the Apple Cinnamon Cheerios and will again when they are free of GMOs.”

 

A few dozen Facebook plaudits are nice, but they aren’t the reason General Mills spent nearly a year adjusting its sourcing and manufacturing processes so as to be able to claim a mass-market cereal free of GMO ingredients. General Mills’ problem, and that of other major food corporations, has been that they have been fighting their customers, and losing business in the process. 

 

An anti-GMO site has for many months pushed General Mills to discontinue including GMO ingredients in Cheerios:“Breakfast is not a science experiment!” it said. The Organic Consumers Association called for a boycott of Kellogg’s Kashi cereal brand because of allegations the supposedly natural cereal includes GMO ingredients. 

 

Now, I’m not a fan of any of these cereals because of the processing involved in creating them, not to mention the added sugar in most. But I do know that smart business executives don’t fight their customers…..except when their companies are so big, they think they can ignore customer concerns. And that is the only explanation I can come up with for why the big food corporations have invested millions fighting GMO (genetically modified organism) labeling initiatives in California and Washington. 

 

Consider: An estimated 40% of American farmland is planted with Monsanto seedsFour companies—General Mills, Kellogg’s, Pepsico, and Kraft Foods–are estimated to control more than 80% of the $10 billion breakfast cereal market. 

 

But even having such clear market dominance doesn’t provide absolute protection against the vagaries of competition. General Mills has seen its cereal sales stagnate. Kellogg’s late last year announced a seven per cent workforce reduction by 2017 because of weakening cereal sales, apparently due in part to the Organic Consumers Association boycott of Kashi. 

 

Then there were the cracks that had begun to appear in the food industry’s seemingly united opposition to GMO labeling. Upscale Whole Foods, seeing competitive advantage in the controversy, announced last March that it has adopted a policy that will require labeling of all foods sold in its stores containing GMO ingredients by 2018. While noting that the labeling won’t be a simple task for some suppliers, Whole Foods trumpeted the fact that it “is the first national grocery chain to set a deadline for full GMO transparency.” 

Whole Foods’ reference to the complexity of the change indicates how far the U.S. has gone down the road toward embracing GMO foods–something General Mills elaborates on in its explanation for the differences in GMO penetration in the U.S. versus Europe: “Cheerios in Europe do not use genetically modified ingredients. But the agriculture and regulatory environments in Europe and the U.S. are quite different….Almost half of the cropland in the U.S. is used to grow genetically modified crops, and 70 to 80 percent of the foods in the average grocery store likely contain GMOs.  In Europe, there is a national standard for labeling non-GM ingredients, and the grain supply is very different.”

 

Turning around the GMO battleship in the U.S. will be a gargantuan task. But all indications are that the consumer concerns about GMOs run wide and deep. The anxiety may not be entirely based on objective science, as a lengthy report in today’s New York Times about Hawaii’s debate on the subject makes clear. It may well be based in significant measure on all the previous food problems that have come to light in the absence of official scientific concerns–poison pesticides, misused antibiotics, CAFO pollution, questionable additives and colorings, over-use of sugar and salt, etc., etc.. Perception shapes reality. 

 

In terms of the General Mills move,  if Cheerios gets a sales boost, other large corporations will feel compelled to take similar action, and the battleship will turn. The marketplace still carries a lot of weight. People often don’t realize how much power they and their wallets hold.