Five years ago, the Organic Consumers Association had Starbucks in its sights. They were running a “frankenbucks campaign” in protest of the company’s annual meeting and were making an effort to prevent Starbucks from selling or using milk produced from cows receiving supplemental bovine growth hormones (rbST/rbGH). Starbucks made the right decision not to be covered by OCA and to continue to serve safe and affordable conventionally produced milk, while offering consumers organic milk produced without the help of these safe supplements as an alternative.
What happened? Well, Starbucks stores stocked up on organic milk in anticipation of the huge demand that activists claimed was there. Organic milk, like all national organic brands, was ultra-pasteurized to extend its shelf life. Unlike conventional local milk, typically pasteurized, with a shelf life of about 14 days, these UP organic brands can last for weeks. Stonyfield Organic claims that their milk can last up to 70 days before stores stop carrying it. Even with the extended shelf life, Starbucks managers across the country reported that they were throwing out far more organic milk than they were selling, so most stores no longer offer it even as an option. The company tells us that the decision to offer an organic milk alternative is now left up to individual stores. Starbucks offers organic soy juice alternatives instead. All of this really puts a dent in OCA’s argument that “consumers demand organic milk.”
Yet once again, Starbucks is the target of an anti-rBST campaign, this time led by Food and Water Watch, a spin-off of Ralph Nader’s anti-corporate, anti-globalization, anti-modern technology, self-proclaimed protector of the populous. public. Citizen. This campaign is launched on the tattooed shirttails of Meatrix II: Revolting of animal rights extremists, who claim to tell the truth about dairy farming.
As Starbucks learned five years ago, most consumers don’t share the demands of these activists. And today we have the activists’ own words to back us up. In a lengthy email chain in response to a question from InformedEating.org’s Michele Simon, who refers to Starbucks as “greedy,” Wynona Hauter of Food and Water Watch writes:
“There were several reasons we chose Starbucks as our target for a rBGH-free campaign, and none of them was that we thought we could transform them into a model corporate citizen. One is that we needed to focus on a national goal that was easily identifiable for the public, it would take a simple action and have a feasible chance of success. More importantly, if Starbucks were to switch to rBGH-free milk, it would have a huge impact.”
We have learned from tax returns and other publicly available documents that the OCA-led Wactivist campaign of five years ago was funded by the same organic dairy industry that would benefit from an attack on conventional milk.
It’s embarrassing, but not surprising, that billion-dollar organic mega-dairies fund activist fear campaigns to increase demand for their high-profit, no-profit products. The Organic Trade Association has gone so far as to produce an online media campaign titled “Store Wars” demonstrating the aggressive lengths to which they will go to mislead consumers and vilify safe and affordable products in order to make money.
Because the disclosure rules for activists like Ralph Nader’s Food & Water Watch are so lax and virtually unenforced by regulators, we won’t know for years who is paying them to attack milk this time. If I were a gambler, my money would be with the same people who bankrolled it last time.
We hope that Starbucks will once again see the folly of capitulating to these demands from advocacy groups and campaigns funded by the organic industry. Because as we and Starbucks know, milk is milk.