Kashi : Our food : Kashi® Cookies, Chocolate Almond Butter.
Kashi (an independently operated subsidiary of Kellogg Company; based in La Jolla, California) makes a number of packaged food products including breakfast cereal and grain bars. In April 2012 Kashi received bad publicity over its use of GMO ingredients, most notably soy. In parallel with defending their use of GMO ingredients, Kashi announced the Non-GMO Project and has certified several of their products. Kashi’s defense centered on their use of ‘natural’ and the prevalence of GMO soy in the US supply chain. (In the US the term ‘natural’ is meaningless since its use is not regulated beyond the vague sense of false advertising – rat droppings and inorganic arsenic are ‘natural’.)
On a related note, the terms ‘organic’ and ‘whole grain’ aren’t guarantors of a healthful product. For example, the simplified version of the Kashi Strawberry Fields cereal is: rice, wheat, sugar, strawberries, rice syrup, salt, raspberries – 3 simple carbs, fruit bits, 1 simple carb, sodium, fruit bits. This is not exactly what I would call the epitome of breakfast nutrition. Likewise the ingredient list for Kashi’s new Chocolate Almond Butter cookies isn’t very impressive: three kinds of sugar, soy lecithin, rice, very inflammatory grains (wheat, barley, and rye), and peanut flour. So while conceptually I like Chocolate Almond Butter Cookies, I’m not going to go out of my way for this version.
Kellogg Company is one of many large packaged food companies with natural foods subsidiaries which has heavily funded the efforts against the November 2012 California ballot measure Proposition 37 which aims to require potential product buyers to be notified as to a product’s GMO ingredient content.