Coca Cola Has a NO GMO Beverage. Parent Companies, Offspring
Coca Cola Has a NO GMO Beverage.
Coca Cola Has a NO GMO Beverage. Parent Companies, Offspring
"That said, one hates to punish good brands for not being perfect. I seem to recall (although I can’t find it) a recent study that showed consumers are tougher on ethical brands than their mass market competitors. THAT certainly seems counter productive. So, the question remains: Is Goldman’s response sufficient?"
Date: 11/28/2012 2:20:14 PM ( 12 y ) ... viewed 1576 times
SO YOU THINK IT IS A GOOD IDEA TO BOYCOTT HONEST TEA????
A PERSONAL MESSAGE FROM SETH GOLDMAN
SETH DISCUSSES GOING FOR COKE RELATIONSHIP AND HIS
MISSION STATEMENT HERE
This Plant Your Dream BLog is part of a series I am doing on Parent-and Offspring Companies.
It the recent Prop 37 fight in CA, Coca Cola gave money to the No side,
but their offspring Honest Tea, has a No GMO Label and is an organic company.
This kind of info plays into the hands of Boycott Organic Company enthusiasts.
To my mind, one of the reasons Prop 37 NO got more votes than the Yes on Prop 37, was because numbers of us on the YES side were spending too much time being distracted by the idea of a boycott, rather than hitting the streets educating about why the RIght to Know was so important.
I, for one, felt this distraction.
at the National Heirloom Expo, I had so many hours to work, but the idea of the boycott was already in motion. Some of the leaders of the boycott were there. I invested a lot of emotional energy in wanting to educate that I did not feel the boycott strategy was a good idea.
I found it personally splintering. I feel it was one factor that distracted me from my most effective result.
"2011 - In March, The Coca-Cola Company purchased Honest Tea, bringing us into the Coke family as an independent operating unit. We continued to innovate by developing a new beverage line called Honest CocoaNova, a cacao infusion with the antioxidants and alkaloid theobromine found in dark chocolate and only 50 calories per bottle. We transitioned all of our green, black, oolong, and white teas over to Fair Trade Certified™, and introduced five new varieties: Mocha, Cherry, and Mint CocoaNova; Zero Calorie Lemonade, and Classic Green Tea. We're also very proud of our second-annual Mission Report, "Keeping It Honest." A project several years in the making finally came to fruition--we refreshed the labels on our plastic-bottled beverages, updating artwork and transitioning the Nutrition Facts panel to reflect the new serving size of one bottle=one serving."
Sambazon Supports Prop. 37 in California
Industry News| Bevnet Feed, Oct 5, 2012
Count the Sambazon team among those organic beverage entrepreneurs — including Mama Chia’s Janie Hoffman and
Honest Tea’s Seth Goldman
— who are publicly supporting Proposition 37, which would force companies using Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) to label their products as such.
Ryan Black, CEO of Sambazon
The company announced today that it had donated $10,000 to the California Right to Know campaign, which is organizing support for the ballot measure.
Many of the largest food and beverage companies, including Coca-Cola Co., Inc., PepsiCo, General Mills, and others are attempting to defeat Prop. 37.
Statement from Sambazon CEO Ryan Black is in the press release, below:
Occasionally we receive inquiries when our parent company, Coca-Cola, supports an effort or an organization that Honest Tea hasn’t historically supported. These situations raise interesting questions and opportunities for reflection.
I have an older brother who votes Republican. He served in the U.S. Army for 25 years, is active in his community, gives generously to charities, and is a father of four wonderful children. Since I’m a lifelong Democrat, my brother and I fundamentally disagree on a wide variety of political issues, but there’s no one I trust more to advise me on finances and our families spend every major holiday together (where there’s always at least one lively conversation about politics).
Honest Tea has been a part of The Coca-Cola Company for the past 15 months, ever since the mission-driven enterprise I started out of my house in 1998 was acquired by the world’s largest beverage company. Distribution of our lightly-sweetened, organic and Fair Trade certified teas has expanded dramatically since the transaction – in 2008 when Coke invested in Honest Tea, we were in 15,000 accounts. Today our products can be found in over 100,000 accounts.
The Organic Consumers Association has called for a boycott of a number of well-known organic product lines owned by the opposition. One of those targeted is Honest Tea, owned by Coca-Cola for the past 15 months. Honest Tea was the first tea company to introduce a USDA-certified organic bottled tea, as well as the first to make a Fair Trade Certified bottled tea. The company’s Honest Kids products do not contain any high fructose corn syrup. In fact, Honest Tea refused to yield to pressure from parent company Coca-Cola to remove the “no high fructose corn syrup!” language from the Honest Kids packaging.
Have you heard from Coke since the publication of the case study?
A.
I talked with a colleague in Atlanta today and, of course, the article came up. We agreed it’s unfortunate that the piece focused on one small road bump, when there are so many positive conversations we’ve had since the deal between Honest Tea and Coca-Cola — conversations about sourcing of organic tea, package reduction, authentic marketing, community-based environmental initiatives and Fair Trade sourcing. Like any healthy relationship, there is give and take, but up to and including the packaging language for Honest Kids, we have collaborated with Coke and haven’t made any change to our business that’s inconsistent with the brand and vision that we started out of my house more than 12 years ago. The partnership with Coke is fundamental to taking Honest Tea’s mission
GROW A HEALTHIER PIZZA 2013--RESIDENT SCHOLARSHIP FOR A YOUTH I CAN TEACH PRINCIPLES OF NATURE AS TAUGHT TO ME
It is important to understand where some of our organic companies are coming from before we go on boycotts that hurt the idea of scale.
I would be honored to work with Honest Tea as a Sponsor for the Grow A Healthier Pizza Project 2013. This project will include educating one Student at the Enchanted Garden Intentional Community so I can start to scale up the Plant Your Dream Blog and ideas that that will help others Keep the Beat with Nature. My inspiration is the work of Edmond Bordeaux Szekely and Dr. Bernard Jensen, two of the elders of the American Health Sanitarium Tradition that took people into a natural environment so that they might grow. To imagine that in an urban environment within walking distance of SDSU, I can teach nature practices, is in itself, a strange idea, but I want to do it here--for now."--Leslie Goldman, Your Enchanted Gardener
--Leslie Goldman, Your Enchanted Gardener
Alert Webmaster
