Forbes has a piece about General Mills' decision to make its original Cheerios cereal GMO-free, suggesting that "the new, non-GMO version of Cheerios isn’t moving the sales needle significantly … and the giant cereal company isn’t planning any more non-GMO products after it went to a lot of trouble to source non-GMO Cheerios."
The story notes that "anti-GMO alarmism still doesn’t persuade Americans the way it has Europeans. Many Americans are smart enough to understand the flimsy arguments about the supposed dangers of genetically modified organisms and even appreciate the many benefits of the practice of bioengineering crops." And it points out that anti-GMO forces are planning to keep pushing General Mills to change other cereals to be GMO-free.
The story notes that "anti-GMO alarmism still doesn’t persuade Americans the way it has Europeans. Many Americans are smart enough to understand the flimsy arguments about the supposed dangers of genetically modified organisms and even appreciate the many benefits of the practice of bioengineering crops." And it points out that anti-GMO forces are planning to keep pushing General Mills to change other cereals to be GMO-free.
- KC's View:
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Yikes! It's been just over 50 days since General Mills announced the switch to GMO-free Cheerios, and the nutritional world hasn't been rocked on its axis. Let's just scrap the whole thing.
This is absurd. First of all, General Mills said from the beginning that it had no intention of going GMO-free with its other Cheerios varieties. And I would never suggest that there is an enormous groundswell of anti-GMO public opinion out there.
I think the General Mills move was an investment in the future, based on a sense that the pendulum may be moving slowly in the direction of GMO labeling. I would've been shocked if suddenly non-GMO Cheerios had started seeing double digit growth, especially because it is my understanding that the cereal category is pretty flat these days.
Let's not get all hysterical just because one company's decision to label one product as being without GMOs didn't change the face of western civilization.
