For related articles and information, please visit OCA's All About Organics page and our Myth of Natural page.

Walk through your local grocery store these days and you'll see the words "all natural" emblazoned on a variety of food packages.  The label is lucrative, for sure, but in discussing the natural label few have remarked on what's really at stake – the natural ingredients and the companies themselves. 

If you take a look at some of the favorite organic and natural food brands, you'll see they're owned by some of the largest conventional companies in the world. Coca-Cola owns Odwalla and Honest Tea. PepsiCo. owns Naked Juice. General Mills owns Lara Bar. Natural and organic food acquisitions aside, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and General Mills all opposed California's GMO Proposition 37 that would require GMO food labeling. Today, some of those companies touting an all-natural list of grains and sugars can be seen changing the ingredients in their natural food products as the natural foods' distribution channels are pushed to larger and larger markets.

Recently, in a class action consumer-fraud lawsuit, Kashi agreed it would stop using "all natural" and "nothing artificial" for its line of cereal products, which, according to plaintiffs, contained unnatural ingredients like pyridoxine hydrochloride, calcium pantothenate and soy oil processed with hexane, a byproduct of gasoline refining in its line.

Kashi's use of "natural" ingredients wasn't in question in 1999 when it made nearly $25 million in sales. But in 2000 Kellogg's purchased Kashi and less than a decade later it was the No. 1 natural foods brand making nearly $600 million in sales. The rise in class-action lawsuits against the "natural" label comes in part because brands like Kashi have ballooned in sales – in other words, there's no money to be found in a smaller, natural company. Yet Kashi rose to the top while continuing to tout its "all natural" ideology of which David DeSouza, Kashi's former general manager (a defendant in the case and formerly with Kellogg's for 19 years prior to joining Kashi), was so fond.