Grocery Update#51: Valentine's Day Break-up's.
New Food and Work Report. Dr. Bronner's Dumps B Corp. And A New Non-UPF Seal.
Valentine's Day Break-up's: 1. New Report on Food and Work. 2. Red Cards To Reject ICE. 3. Dr. Bronner’s Breaks Up With B-Corp. 4. Non-GMO Project Will Help You Dump UPFs. 5. Jennifer Clapp On Ending World Hunger. 6. Tunes.
(Epic display courtesy of Wegman’s clerks. We do love Wegman’s.)
1. New Report: Labor & Exploitation in the Food System.
By Food Chain Workers Alliance, Research by Winston Moore.
From production to processing, distribution, retail, and service, food workers fare worse than nearly all other workers by basically any measure that we looked at. Low wages, high rates of injury, high rates of food insecurity, and low unionization are just some of the trends that continue to make food work some of the most exploitative in the country.
The food system has the highest number of workers in the United States, more than one in four work in the food system.
Compared to workers in other industries, frontline food workers are 68% more likely to live below the poverty line.
Out of ~28 million workers in the U.S. food system, nearly 70% are in frontline jobs — twice the rate of other industries.
Frontline food workers continue to be among the lowest paid workers in the U.S., earning a median income of $28,000 per year.
Across all races, women in the food industry earn, on average, 66% of what men are paid.
Wage theft is a major problem across the food system, more than any other industry.
Frontline food system workers are more likely to be women of color, people of color, and immigrants than the general workforce.
Food workers are more likely to be food insecure than workers in any other industry.
In 2022, frontline food workers were 93% more likely to be food insecure than non-food workers, with nearly 1 in 5 frontline food workers being insecure.
Food workers are 60% more likely to rely on SNAP, 53% more likely to rely on energy subsidies, 35% more likely to rely on public health insurance, and 13% more likely to rely on rent subsidies.
Since 2019, food insecurity rates rose 22% for the country as a whole, 33% for food workers, and 96% and 87% for food workers in distribution and processing sectors.
Food workers are also 81% more likely to be without healthcare coverage.
Less than 6% of food workers are protected by a union contract.
What To Do:
1. Just Wages
2. Health & Safety
3. Fair Work Standards
4. Migrant Justice
5. Racial, Gender and GlobalJustice
6. Solidarity, Bread & Roses
7. End Labor Exploitation of Incarcerated People
Learn more about the FCWA’s organizing platform at foodworkersorganize.org.
2. Know Your Rights Vs ICE.
Immigrant Legal Resource Center’s Red Cards.
The ILRC trains attorneys, paralegals, and community-based advocates who work with immigrants around the country. ILRC works with grassroots immigrant organizations to promote civic engagement and social change.
All people in the United States, regardless of immigration status, have certain rights and protections under the U.S. Constitution. The ILRC’s Red Cards help people assert their rights and defend themselves in many situations, such as when ICE agents go to a home.
Click To Order Red Cards for friends, family or colleagues.
The Checkout Is Sponsored By the Specialty Food Association.
3. Dr. Bronner’s Breaks Up With B Corp Certification.
Dr. Bronner’s, the top-selling natural brand of soap in North America, and the highest scoring B Corp, announced it will drop its B Corp Certification and not renew with B Lab, the organization that manages the well-known certification for companies with a stated social purpose. The announcement follows a campaign by Dr. Bronner’s calling on B Lab to meaningfully improve the B Corp standard.
“To Dr. Bronner’s and many Certified B Corps, ‘Business for good’ is more than a trendy and profitable marketing strategy. As a purpose-driven company, we do business to model a more just economy, and to demonstrate that a truly constructive multi-stakeholder approach to capitalism could be the norm…
”The increasing certification of multinationals including Unilever Australia and Nespresso in 2022 followed by Nestle Health Sciences in 2023 demonstrated that B Lab is not committed to protecting the integrity of the B Corp Certification and movement, nor ensuring that the certification won’t be used to mislead consumers. Sharing the same logo and messaging regarding being of ‘benefit’ to the world with large multinational CPG companies with a history of serious ecological and labor issues, and no comprehensive or credible eco-social certification of supply chains, is unacceptable to us.
”Industrial agriculture and factory farming are ecological and social disasters, and key drivers of climate change and the sixth mass extinction event humanity is causing.
“Requiring credible third party eco-social certification of all major multinational supply chains would protect against the B Corp Certification being misused by companies to hide these unsustainable and unjust corporate practices...
”We have not seen adequate, transparent, and timely action from B Lab to update the standards or certification process to address our concerns. Now, our only recourse is to drop our certification. We hope our exit will prompt necessary and overdue action, and that allies who remain B Corp Certified will continue to push to improve the standard from the inside.”
Dr. Bronner’s first became certified as a B Corp in 2015 and the company’s score has increased with each recertification, and most recently in 2022, the company achieved the highest B Corp score globally to-date of 206.7, surpassing the previously stated score ceiling of 200. The median score for all companies that complete the assessment is 50.9, and a score of 80 qualifies a company for certification. Dr. Bronner’s partnered with other concerned B Corps in June of 2022, to issue an open letter expressing concerns with B Corp Certification and in January of 2023 sent a private letter to B Lab leadership, advising that if the company did not see a satisfactory approach instituted in the revised standard by 2024, that the company would likely drop their B Corp Certification instead of recertifying.
David Bronner was also quoted in Bloomberg, “There’s that tendency to go along to get along — to kiss the ring of power,” said David. But “administrations come and go. We’ll ride this moment out.”
(Editor’s note: No matter the score, all B Corp certified products get the same logo, which is different from gluten free, organic or Non-GMO seals, which are “pass/fail” systems. This means that Nestle products will have the same logo as Dr. Bronner’s, despite radically different supply chains and audit scores.)
4. Four Questions With Megan Westgate On Non-UPF Verified.
Megan Westgate is the founder and CEO of the Non-GMO Project, where the Project’s iconic butterfly has become one of the most recognized and trusted marks in the retail food industry. Megan also now leads the Non-UPF Verified program under the Food Integrity Collective.
Q: What is the role of Non-GMO verification and how does it relate to organic and regenerative production models?
Non-GMO verification protects the integrity of our food system by ensuring transparency and choice in the face of unchecked genetic engineering. When we started this work, only a handful of biotech companies were developing GMOs. Today, our research team is tracking nearly 600 companies working on everything from synthetic biology to gene editing—many of which bypass traditional regulations and enter the market with no labeling. While organic prohibits GMOs, and regenerative agriculture prioritizes soil health, neither system currently requires the level of testing or supply chain tracking needed to fully address the rapid expansion of new genetic engineering techniques. By working in concert with these movements, Non-GMO verification strengthens the foundation for a food system rooted in integrity, transparency, and trust.
Q: What do you mean by food integrity?
Food integrity means recognizing that food is not just a commodity—it’s the foundation of life, health, and our connection to the Earth. Our current food system, built on a paradigm of separation, has fractured these relationships, prioritizing efficiency and profit over nourishment and wellbeing. True food integrity requires a shift from extractive models to systems that promote reciprocal thriving, where food nourishes not just people but the entire web of life. This is the future we’re working to co-create: a food system rooted in transparency, trust, and a deep understanding of interconnection.
Q: Why did NGP decide to pursue transparency on UPFs through a certification program?
Ultra-processed foods dominate the modern diet, driving metabolic dysfunction and cognitive decline, yet consumers have no clear way to identify and avoid them. Non-UPF Verified brings long-overdue clarity to food processing, just as the Non-GMO Project did for genetic engineering. Rooted in science, with the NOVA classification system as a foundational reference, our standard is being refined through real-world application. This spring and summer, we’re running a pilot with brands while inviting public input to ensure a rigorous, actionable standard that supports both eaters and food system transformation.
Q: What is your long-term vision for the food system?
Food is meant to nourish life, but our current system has lost sight of that, reducing food to a commodity and fragmenting it from the relationships that sustain us. This disconnection is showing up everywhere—from the erosion of soil health to the epidemic of metabolic and cognitive disease to the suffering of human and more-than-human communities alike. But food has always been a force for remembering. When grown in ways that honor biodiversity, processed with care, and shared in a spirit of reciprocity, it has the power to restore wellbeing—not just for people, but for the entire web of life. At the Food Integrity Collective, we are working to catalyze this shift—bringing together those who are ready to reimagine standards, cultivate coherence, and align food systems with the truth of our interdependence.
(Disclosure: The Editor has been a board member and long time collaborator with Non GMO Project and oversaw the Non-GMO verification of over 10,000 products at Whole Foods. Non GMO Project is a small non-profit (<$7 million budget) that has since verified tens of thousands of products and created a Non-GMO “moat” to protect the market of identity preserved, organic, regenerative and heirloom crops. )
5. Only Political Will Can End World Hunger.
By Jennifer Clapp, IPES-Food, originally published by The Conversation.
Jennifer Clapp is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability, University of Waterloo.
History has shown us again and again that, so long as inequality goes unchecked, no amount of technology can ensure people are well fed. Today, the world produces more food per person than ever before. Yet hunger and malnutrition persist in every corner of the globe, and increasingly, in some of its wealthiest countries.
The major drivers of food insecurity are well known: conflict, poverty, inequality, economic shocks and escalating climate change. In other words, the causes of hunger are fundamentally political and economic.
The urgency of the hunger crisis has prompted 150 Nobel and World Food Prize laureates to call for “moonshot” technological and agricultural innovations to boost food production, meaning monumental and lofty efforts. However, they largely ignored hunger’s root causes — and the need to confront powerful entities and make courageous political choices.
To focus almost exclusively on promoting agricultural technologies to ramp up food production would be to repeat the mistakes of the past.
The Green Revolution of the 1960s-70s brought impressive advances in crop yields, though at considerable environmental cost. It failed to eliminate hunger, because it didn’t address inequality. Take Iowa, for example — home to some of the most industrialized food production on the planet. Amid its high-tech corn and soy farms, 11 per cent of the state’s population, and one in six of its children, struggle to access food.
Even though the world already produces more than enough food to feed everyone, it’s woefully misallocated. Selling food to poor people at affordable prices simply isn’t as profitable for giant food corporations.
They make far more by exporting it for animal feed, blending it into biofuels for cars or turning it into industrial products and ultra-processed foods. To make matters worse, a third of all food is simply wasted.
Meanwhile, as the laureates remind us, more than 700 million people — nine per cent of the world’s population — remain chronically undernourished. A staggering 2.3 billion people — more than one in four — cannot access an adequate diet.
Measures to address world hunger must start with its known causes and proven policies. Brazil’s Without Hunger program, for example, has seen dramatic 85 per cent reduction in severe hunger in just 18 months through financial assistance, school food programs and minimum wage policies.
Our politicians must confront and reverse gross inequities in wealth, power and access to land. Hunger disproportionately affects the poorest and most marginalized people, not because food is scarce, but because people can’t afford it or lack the resources to produce it for themselves. Redistribution policies aren’t optional, they’re essential.
Governments must put a stop to the use of hunger as a weapon of war. The worst hunger hotspots are conflict zones, as seen in Gaza and Sudan, where violence drives famine. Too many governments have looked the other way on starvation tactics — promoting emergency aid to pick up the pieces instead of taking action to end the conflicts driving hunger.
Stronger antitrust and competition policies are vital to curb extreme corporate concentration in global food chains — from seeds and agrochemicals to grain trading, meat packing and retail — that allow firms to fix prices and wield outsized political influence.
Governments must also break the stranglehold of inequitable trade rules and export patterns that trap the poorest regions in dependency on food imports, leaving them vulnerable to shocks.
Instead, supporting local and territorial markets is critical in helping build resilience to economic and supply chain disruptions. These markets provide livelihoods and help ensure diverse, nutritious foods reach those who need them.
Mitigating and adapting to climate change requires massive investments in transformative approaches that promote resilience and sustainability in food systems.
Agroecology — a farming system that applies ecological principles to ensure sustainability and promotes social equity in food systems — is a key solution, proven to sequester carbon, build resilience to climate shocks and reduce dependence on expensive and environmentally damaging synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
More research should explore agroecology’s full potential. And we must adopt plant-rich, local and seasonal diets, ramp up measures to tackle food waste and reconsider using food crops for biofuels.
This means pushing back against Big Meat and biofuel lobbies, while investing in climate-resilient food systems.
This is not to say that technology has no role — all hands need to be on deck. But the innovations most worth pursuing are those that genuinely support more equitable and sustainable food systems, and not corporate profits. Unless scientific efforts are matched by policies that confront power and prioritize equity over profit, then hunger is likely to here to stay.
The solutions to hunger are neither new nor beyond reach. What’s missing is the political will to address its root causes.
6. Tunes.
I have been in a Hendrix vibe lately. Dude was the GOAT.
peace.