Title: Five Reasons to Boycott Starbucks
Headings: Five Reasons to Boycott Starbucks
Five Reasons to Boycott Starbucks
Boycott Starbucks

Content: It resonates with customers.” Here’s what would “resonate” with consumers who want healthy food choices—organic, non-GMO food and beverages. Instead, as “Food Babe” Vani Hari wrote last year, Starbucks’ offerings include preservatives, high fructose (GMO) corn syrup, proplyene glycol, chemically derived sugars, cellulose gum (a filler made from wood pulp), and azodicarbonamide, a substance banned in other countries and linked to asthma. And that’s the short list. Starbucks is a member of the Grocery Manufacturers Association
Maybe all those GMO-tainted foods are the reason Starbucks supports the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), the lobbying group that has spent millions of dollars to defeat GMO labeling laws? Last year the anti-GMO movement was locked in a fierce battle—on Starbucks’ home turf, Washington State—with Monsanto and the processed-food industry, over I-522, a citizens’ initiative to label GMOs. The measure was defeated, by a mere 1 percent, after companies like Monsanto and Coca-Cola, and their multi-billion dollar lobbying group, the GMA, spent millions to defeat it. The GMA stooped to illegally laundering contributions to defeat I-522. The group also donated $2.2 million to defeat a similar labeling initiative in California, in 2012. All told, GMA and its members spent about $20 million to defeat Prop 37.