America’s largest chocolate company Hershey’s will make its iconic Kisses chocolates and its Milk Chocolate Bars free of ingredients from genetically modified organisms (GMOs) by the end of the year, revealed US sustainability non-profit Green America on Monday.
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The announcement comes less than a week after Hershey’s pledged in a statement to transition to “simple and easy-to-understand” ingredients such as fresh milk, almonds, cocoa beans, and sugar.
To achieve this, the company will introduce new products that have no artificial colours and flavouring, and be free of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HCFS), commonly linked to obesity and diabetes.
In recent years, Hershey’s, along with fellow food company Mars, has been under intense pressure from various advocacy groups and the public to remove GMO ingredients from its products sold in the United States. These included milk from cows injected with a growth hormone and sugar from genetically modified sugar beets.
The company last December announced that it was exploring ways to to move away from HFCS across its range of products, which sparked fresh calls for Hershey’s to replace the syrup with organic, ethical cane sugar, rather than from cheap GMO sugar beets.
The company’s pledge to make its Kisses and Milk Chocolate Bars GMO-free by December was welcomed by Green America, who supports an anti-GMO campaign called ‘GMO Inside’ that has petitioned Hershey’s to remove GMO ingredients from its products sold in the United States since February 2013.
Nicole McCann, food campaigns director, Green America, congratulated Hershey’s “on this important move and great first step”.
“Hershey’s joins General Mills, Unilever, Post Foods, and other leading companies in responding to consumer demand to make at least some of its products non-GMO,” she said, adding that this commitment would also move other companies in the chocolate sector to similar action.
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Consumers are increasingly looking for non-GMO products and verification, and Hershey’s and its competitors would be wise to offer third-party verified non-GMO products to consumers.
John Roulac, co-chair, GMO Inside campaign
GMOs - food whose genetic material, or DNA, has been artificially modified to achieve certain qualities such as resistance to pests or weed killers, or faster growth in livestock – have increasingly become a cause for concern among environmental and health groups in recent decades.
For example, GMO crops are associated with higher use of toxic pesticides and herbicides, as the weeds and insects in the vicinity of the crops also develop higher resistance to the chemicals.
Hence, ever-stronger toxins are required to kill these ‘superweeds’ and ‘superbugs’, which not only pollutes soil and water resources, but also poses a threat to ecologically important insects such as bees and butterflies. The GMO Inside campaign also says that GMOs are not yet proven safe for human consumption.
Hershey’s Kisses and Milk Chocolate Bars, which are already gluten free and contain no HFCS, will soon join its existing organic range of products such as Cocoa Powder and Unsweetened Baking Chocolate.
John Roulac, co-chair of GMO inside, said that Hershey’s should expand the non-GMO ingredients to all of its chocolate, and also get third-party verification to ascertain that its products are not GMO. Prohibiting ingredients such as artificial vanilla is also important, he said.
“Consumers are increasingly looking for non-GMO products and verification, and Hershey’s and its competitors would be wise to offer third-party verified non-GMO products to consumers,” added Roulac.
Hershey’s move to simpler ingredients is an expansion of its responsible sourcing efforts – in 2013, the company pledged to source 100 per cent certified sustainable cocoa by 2020, and also to get all its palm oil from traceable and certified sustainable sources by December last year.
The company also aims to make information about the ingredients in its product and its sourcing and manufacturing processes clearly available on its packaging and website.
John Bilbrey, president and chief executive of the Hershey Company, said that the initiative stemmed from a belief that “we all want and deserve to know what’s in our food”.
Even as the company strives to simplify its ingredients, “for ingredients that may not be as simple, we will explain what they are and why we need them,” he added.
