Coca-Cola has had a prominent part of America’s history since 1886 and has been a trusted product among consumers for many decades.
Lately, however, Coca-Cola has been caught trying to hide certain elements of their products and their contents and have paid big bucks to keep these secrets hidden.
The company owns several different drinks including Honest Tea, Odwalla, Powerade, Vitamin Water, Simply Orange, and other products which are aimed to appeal to the health-conscious consumers.
It’s biggest and most well known product of course is Coca-Cola, a product that completely lacks any nutritional value and is often blamed for contributing to the growing obesity epidemic — an epidemic that is costing hundreds of billions of dollars and causing hundreds of thousands of deaths each year.
Campaign finance reports, released in October revealed that Coca-Cola had secretly contributed more than a million dollars to the fight against GMO labeling in Washington.
It took the state’s Attorney General suing the Grocery Manufacturers’ Association (GMA) for what turned out to be an $11 million violation of the state’s campaign finance laws to reveal these secret contributions.
Now that the truth has been exposed, some health activists are fighting back.
Andrew Kimbrell, founder of the Center for Food Safety, states:
Consumers of healthy beverages want to know what’s in their food. By using money from sales of natural brands to secretly fund an anti-choice agenda that deprives consumers of the right to know what they’re eating, Coca-Cola has been betraying the public interest and standing on the wrong side of history.
We at the Food Revolution Network agree. And we have launched a petition on Change.org that calls for Coca-Cola to stop funding anti GMO labeling campaigns. Coca-Cola’s CEO, Muhtar Kent, says, “We have… provided a tremendous amount of choice to people.”
But when it comes to the right to know if your food was genetically engineered, Coca-Cola wants to keep you in the dark.
According to reports, Honest Tea co-founder Seth Goldman said as recently as September that “after internal discussions,” Coca-Cola wouldn’t be “directly” funding efforts to defeat I-522.
Evidently Coca-Cola believed that illegally laundering money through the Grocery Manufacturers’ Association would keep their involvement a secret.
Honest Tea doesn’t live up to its name when it’s being used to put an organic face on an alleged money laundering scheme, whose goal is keeping you from knowing if your food is genetically engineered or not.
To make matters worse, Honest Tea proudly proclaims on their website that they are GMO free — while their parent company is vigorously working to prevent GMO labeling.
Food Revolution wrote Coca-Cola asking if they intended to continue funding anti GMO labeling campaigns.
The company’s response was to repeat the anti-labeling lobby’s talking points. Food revolution was told that Washington’s labeling initiative, I-522, would: “Require tens of thousands of common food and beverage products to be relabeled exclusively for Washington State unless they are remade with higher-priced, specially developed ingredients.
The measure will increase grocery costs for a typical Washington family by hundreds of dollars per year.”
These are charges that the nine-time Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper The Seattle Times called “mostly false” and that Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, flatly rejected.
So basically, Coca-Cola has not only tried to hide their contributions to the anti-labeling efforts in Washington, but they continue to try to deceive people about the actual realities of GMO labeling.
They are using sales of Honest Tea, Odwalla, Powerade, Vitamin Water, Simply Orange, and all their other brands, to finance their agenda.
Fortunately as informed consumers, we are now aware of this farce and can avoid these products all together.
