WhiteWave Introduces New Yogurt
After disseminating the report yesterday that Dean Foods/WhiteWave was introducing their Rachel’s brand, the leading organic milk label in Great Britain, in the United States who would have thought that it would not be made with organic milk! We thank a number of our members who carefully read through Dean’s material, and checked on their website, for bringing this to our attention.
At a time when the organic dairy industry is facing an extreme surplus you would’ve thought that our friends at Dean Foods would’ve taken this opportunity to bring their Rachel’s Organic brand from England to the United States, not opting to manufacture the product with conventional milk.
I guess this shouldn’t completely surprise us because what motivates the management and shareholders at this corporation, despite their rhetoric, appears to be bottom line profits. Here’s a little pop quiz. What do the following have in common:
- Rachel’s® premium priced yogurt made with “natural” milk
- International Delight® nondairy coffee creamer (in Wisconsin we refer to this as “white-death.” Read the ingredients!)
- Stoke® a shot of extra caffeine for your coffee (the drug of choice for their target market—young white males)
- Silk® America’s leading soymilk (made in part with “organic” soybeans imported from Brazil and China)
- Horizon®, America’s best-selling organic milk in grocery stores and Wal-Mart (not in natural food stores with more knowledgeable consumers)
- WhiteWave® brand tofu will no longer be sold by Dean Foods/WhiteWave. It was announced today that they sold this brand to Hain Celestial.
If you said they are all a part of Dean/WhiteWave you would be 100% correct. And what ties them together is not a philosophy of environmental stewardship, or economic justice for family-scale farmers, its sheer profit by the $10 billion behemoth that has used its clout to control as much as 90% of the dairy market in areas like New England and Michigan (owner of almost 40 independent brands around the country and the nation’s largest milk marketer/processor).
Again, thanks to the Cornucopia members and other trusted organic community participants that brought the fact that Rachel’s would not be an organic product to our attention.
Mark A. Kastel
The Cornucopia Institute
kastel@cornucopia.org
