Best known for its breakfast cereals, Kellogg Co. became the third major U.S. foodmaker in four days to say it will put GMO labels on is products nationwide to satisfy Vermont’s first-in-the-nation label law, which is effective July 1.
“We continue to strongly urge Congress to pass a uniform, federal solution for the labeling of GMOs to avoid a confusing patchwork of state-by-state laws,” said Paul Norman, president of Kellogg North America. The food industry wants Congress to pre-empt state GMO labeling laws and to keep labeling voluntary on the federal level. In a GMO position statement on the Internet, Kellogg supports “legislation to establish a federal standard for companies that want to voluntarily label their foods for the absence or presence of GMO food ingredients.”
In a statement, Norman says, “Until a federal solution is reached, and in order to comply with Vermont’s labeling law, some of our products will include the words ‘Produced with Genetic Engineering’ beginning in mid-to-late July. These will appear nationwide because a special label for Vermont would be costly for us and our consumers.”
Kellogg is the 13th-largest U.S. processor with sales of $9.5 billion in 2015, according to Food Processing magazine. General Mills, 10th on Food Processing’s list of the largest food and beverage companies in Canada and the United States with sales of $12.5 billion, and Mars, No. 11 with sales estimated at $11 billion, announced last Friday that they would put labels on their products.
“Vermont’s fast-approaching labeling mandate is forcing food companies to make costly decisions on how to comply by the July 1 effective date or face severe finds of $1,000 a day per item,” says the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a leading proponent of state pre-emption and voluntary labeling.
Labeling advocates say consumers have a right to know what is in their food and the information should be available at a glance. Farm groups and food processors say GMOs are safe and that consumers would interpret a label as a warning, which would stigmatize products made with GMOs. Half of U.S. cropland is planted with GMO crops, chiefly corn and soybeans but also cotton, canola and sugar beets, with the result that most of the processed food sold in supermarkets contains GMOs.
Surveys of Americans on GMOs produce differing results. The Pew Center said last July that its public-opinion survey on science and technology found women and blacks “appear to be more leery” of GMO foods than the population overall. “A minority of adults, 37 percent, say that eating GM food is generally safe while 57 percent say it is unsafe.” One-fourth of respondents said they always look for GMO labeling when they shop for food.
In related news, Wisconsinites pay much more attention to the freshness and price of food than to whether it contains GMOs, say University of Wisconsin researchers, based on responses of 1,006 people to a mail survey last spring. Some 94 percent of respondents said freshness was highly important to them, followed by price at 57 percent, easy to prepare at 45 percent, locally grown at 43 percent, GMO-free at 33 percent and organically grown at 20 percent. One-fifth of participants said they ate organic food “often” or “very often.”
“Importantly, only 6 percent of respondents indicated they ‘often’ or ‘very often’ ate GM foods, while 18 percent of respondents were unsure” if they ate GMO foods, said the researchers in a report released last month.
A study published by Montclair State University, based on a survey of 331 adult shoppers in New Jersey grocery stores, said “in the present research, we find that attitudes toward GM foods do not always correlate with purchasing behavior.”