Whole Foods has reneged on its promise to label all products containing GMOs. Five years after promising costumers that they would label everything containing mixed or altered DNA by September of 2018, the famed health food chain has decided that it doesn’t need to keep its promises.
Whole Foods was recently acquired by Amazon, and the new management has made it abundantly clear that they have no intention of following through with promises made before the change in leadership.
The health food company had been taking a significant amount of criticism from suppliers. Suppliers were complaining that having to comply with both USDA labeling requirements and those of Whole Foods was too much. Now that Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is in charge suppliers no longer have to worry about the new labeling requirements.
In 2012, the supermarket chain came under fire from customers who were venting concerns about whether or not the products they were buying were as healthy as advertised. Rumors were circling that Whole Foods was being dishonest about the number of GMOs on their shelves. To answer those concerns, the company made a promise the following year.
In 2013, Whole Foods CEO Walter Robb said, “We are putting a stake in the ground on GMO labeling to support the consumer’s right to know.”
Six years ago, Naturalnews.com released an undercover video which proved that Whole Foods was training its employees to intentionally mislead customers into believing that their products were GMO-free. Soon the Organic Consumers Association joined the fight and increased the pressure on Whole Foods to come clean about the GMO content of its products. As a response, the supermarket chain released a statement promising to take the lead and require clearer labeling.
In 2011, a report from the Chicago Tribune reported on a series of dramatic protests where consumers organized by the OCA demanded better transparency on food products. What the report showed was a growing segment of the population who was becoming increasingly aware of the dangers of packaged food and deceptive labeling.
This group had every appearance of representing a growing segment of the population. What was becoming abundantly apparent was the fact that people were beginning to realize how much poison was in their foods already.
Having just learned about the possible dangers of GMOs, and how little is known about their effects on health, health-conscious people appeared to feel backed into a corner.
At that point, Whole Foods was the only major food retail corporation which based its entire value proposition on offering food products that have not been genetically tampered with. This placed them in the uncomfortable position of taking all of the heat from people willing to commute and spend extra money for at least the promise of natural food.
Five years later, the promise to label all foods containing GMOs appears to have been an unattainable goal. But the supermarket chain could not simply back down. To save face, there was only one thing that could be done- change management. That is exactly what they did.
Now that Bezos is in charge, any hope that the last corporate holdout for non-GMO food would hold its ground is dashed.
To put the final nail in the coffin of hopes that Whole Foods would keep its promise, company Chief Operations officer, A.C. Gallo wrote an email which essentially told distributors that they were off the hook. It read in part, “As the USDA finalizes the federal regulation in the coming months and the food industry assesses the impact, we do not want our Policy to pose further challenges for you and your business.”
What we’re looking at here is the unmasking of what was essentially a marketing stunt intended to deflect concerns over GMO content in food. When Prop 37 was defeated, and Whole Foods lost a great deal of credibility- the company made a desperate promise in an attempt to regain some of that credibility. To their credit, it has worked for the past five years. The company was able to retain most of its customer base and attract more health-conscious people.
But now it would appear that pressure from distributors is so strong, and the power of the networks behind them is so complete, that Whole Foods was forced to back down publicly. In order to do so without appearing to be completely hypocritical, they needed to bring in the fixer. They needed the openly anti-human technocrat, Jeff Bezos. The message of Bezos is, ‘You will eat what we give you to eat and you have no right to know what is in it.’
~ Health Scams Exposed
