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Has Organic Been Oversized?
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: July 17th, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/business/organic-food-puri...
Organic food has become a wildly lucrative business for Big Food and a premium-price-means-premium-profit section of the grocery store. The industrys image contented cows grazing on the green hills of family-owned farms is mostly pure fantasy. Or rather, pure marketing. Big Food, it turns out, has spawned what might be called Big Organic. Bear Naked, Wholesome & Hearty, Kashi: All three and more actually belong to the cereals giant Kellogg. Naked Juice? That would be PepsiCo, of Pepsi and Fritos fame. And behind the pastoral-sounding Walnut Acres, Healthy Valley and Spectrum Organics is none other than Hain Celestial, once affiliated with Heinz, the grand old name in ketchup. Over the past decade, since federal organic standards have come to the fore, giant agri-food corporations like these and others Coca-Cola, Cargill, ConAgra, General Mills, Kraft and M&M Mars among them have gobbled up most of the nations organic food industry. Pure, locally produced ingredients from small family farms? Not so much anymore. Many consumers may not realize the extent to which giant corporations have come to dominate organic food. Then again, giant corporations dont exactly trumpet their role in the industry. Their financial motivation, however, is obvious. Between the time the Agriculture Department came up with its proposed regulations for the organic industry in 1997 and the time those rules became law in 2002, myriad small, independent organic companies from Honest Tea to Cascadian Farm were snapped up by corporate titans. Heinz and Hain together bought 19 organic brands.
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