"It's hard to keep up with the corporate take-overs"
Burt's Bees owned by Clorox, Tom's is owned by Colgate-Palmolive, Odwalla owned by Coca-Cola, Naked-Juice by Pepsi,
"super healthy" Kashi cereals, the favorites of millions of healthy breakfast eaters, owned by Kellogg's, the 12th-largest company in North American food sales, according to Food Processing.
By Andrea Whitfill, AlterNet. Posted March 17, 2009.
"Confident that you are buying good, socially conscious brands? Find out the real story behind all that marketing money and store visibility."
"What's important to keep in mind is that these big corporations are getting into organics not because they have doubts about their prior business practices or doubts about chemical, industrial agriculture," said Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association. "They're getting in because they want to make a lot of money -- they want to make it fast." He said the companies couldn't care less about "family farmers making the transition to organic farms."
Judy Wickes from the Social Venture Network describes corporate takeovers of socially responsible businesses as "a threat to democracy when wealth and power are concentrated into a few hands." And David Korten, in his book, When Corporations Rule the World, explained how sustainable business "should be human scale -- not necessarily tiny firms, but preferably not more than 500 people -- always with a bias to smaller is better."
[So-called organic brands] are frequently cogs in the giant corporate wheel. I like to refer to this "other" business model as "We've Been Had." It is time for we, the consumer, to question how much the ownership and neglectful marketing of these "pseudo" responsible brands warrant crossing them off our shopping list.
And it is time to find products more in tune with our values, which include thinking small. At least until they, too, get bought out by some large conglomerate.
rest of article: http://tinyurl.com/cc38kj
---ellen