The success of the organic sector has not escaped the notice of corporate giants, which have been buying up organic brands and investing serious money into getting them into your carts.
Cornucopia believes you have a right to know who owns these companies. That’s why we have updated our popular Who Owns Organic? graphic, informed by the research of food systems expert Dr. Phil Howard, in a new poster that shows how a handful of large corporations control the marketplace for organic consumer packaged goods.
(To find the brands that are still independently owned, consult our new Independent Brand Project.)
As a watchdog organization, Cornucopia is committed to keeping you informed. Together we can fight for transparency in organic food.
History
Dr. Phil Howard is a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and a professor at Michigan State University. He published the very first Who Owns Organic? chart in 2002, and has offered updates since then. Looking at them side-by-side, you can track consolidation in organics over decades:
Dr. Howard said this in 2020:
I put together the first version of this graphic in 2003, approximately a year after the USDAs national organic standard was phased in. This national standard helped to catalyze scores of acquisitions of pioneering organic brands by larger food processors and venture capitalists. These trends have only intensified, to the point that nearly all of the 30 largest processors in North America have acquired organic brands. In addition, the scale of transactions has increased, such as the acquisition of natural/organic foods giant WhiteWave by Danone for $12.5 billion (July 2016). Some processors that resisted enormous buyout offers for many years have more recently been acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars (Pacific Foods, Applegate Farms, and So Delicious/Turtle Mountain/Purely Decadent).
The Cornucopia Institute has aided Dr. Howard’s work by sharing research and information over the years. Says Cornucopia’s executive director Melody Morrell, “We are truly grateful for Dr. Howard’s thoughtful analysis of consolidation in organics. His work informs our scorecards and allows us all to know where our money is really going.”
