Arkansas just banned the weedkiller that damaged hundreds of farmers’ crops this year.
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Just One Small Problem With This Major Report on GMO Safety
Mother Jones
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About a year ago, the prestigious National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine produced a 584-page report assessing the health, environmental, and agronomic impact of genetically modified crops. The conclusion: GMOs have so far proved to be neither a disaster nor a triumph. They haven’t been shown to pose a threat to human health, as some critics have argued they do; but they also haven’t discernibly raised crop yields, as some boosters insist they have.
Not surprisingly, the report did little to “end the highly polarized dispute over biotech crops,” concluded New York Times reporter Andrew Martin in an article just after the report’s release. He added that both sides of the debate “pointed approvingly to findings that buttressed their viewpoint and criticized those that did not.”
And a new paper, published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS-One, ups the temperature of that long-simmering debate. The authors—Sheldon Krimsky, a professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts, and Tim Schwab, a researcher at Food & Water Watch—found that 6 of the 20 scientists who contribute to NASEM’s GMO report had ties to the ag-biotech industry that weren’t disclosed in the paper. Five of them “had patents or industry research funding” while they served on the committee, and another one “reported receiving industry research funding” a few years before.
As Krimsky and Schwab note, the NASEM paper states that the GMO assessment, launched only after face-to-face conversations, “determined that no one with an avoidable conflict of interest is serving on the committee.”
They also uncovered another undisclosed potential conflict: The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, a nonprofit institution, has had substantial funding from the very companies whose products were assessed in the report: “The organization’s annual financial reports do not give exact figures but note that three leading agricultural biotechnology companies (Monsanto, DuPont, and Dow) have given up to $5 million dollars each to the NASEM.” The National Academies even hosted a 2015 workshop on communicating the science of GMO crops to the public, funded in part by Monsanto and DuPont.
The PLOS-One findings do not invalidate the findings of the GMO assessment, of course. Having a financial interest in an industry does not automatically make a scientist incapable of commenting honestly on that industry’s products. Fred Gould, professor of entomology at North Carolina State University and the chair of the committee that wrote the report, defended it in an email. “The one implicit rule on our committee was that if you wanted something to go into the report, you had to back it up with evidence that was acceptable to everyone on the committee,” he wrote. “No one person could steer the committee with an opinion. I welcome people to scrutinize the accuracy of our report.” (Gould was not one of the six committee members found by the PlOS authors to have industry ties.)
In a statement, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine denied that members of the committee violated conflict-of-interest disclosure norms. NASEM maintains a “stringent, well-defined, and transparent conflict-of-interest policy, with which all members of this study committee complied,” the statement reads. “It is unfair and disingenuous for the authors of the PLOS article to apply their own perception of conflict of interest to our committee in place of our tested and trusted conflict-of-interest policies.”
However, NASEM’s published policy on the topic mentions “patents, copyrights, and other intellectual property” and “research funding and other forms of research support” as potential conflicts of interest. William Kearney, deputy executive director and director of media relations for NASEM, said the group sees such relationships as conflicts only when they’re worth at least $10,000. By NASEM’s reckoning, none of the committee members violated the group’s disclosure policy.
All of that said, the undisclosed relationships uncovered by Krimsky and Schwab raise questions about the NASEM’s ability to fulfill its mission of providing “nonpartisan, objective guidance for decision makers on pressing issues.” And as Krimsky and Schwab also note, the National Academies’ problem with conflicts of interest is long-standing. Back in 2006, the Center for Science in the Public Interest issued a report finding that nearly a fifth of the scientists appointed to one of the group’s panels over a three-year period had “direct financial ties to companies or industry groups with a direct stake in the outcome of that study.”
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Congress sends GMO-labeling bill to Obama’s desk
He’ll sign it
Congress sends GMO-labeling bill to Obama’s desk
By Nathanael Johnsonon Jul 14, 2016Share
The United States took another step toward requiring food makers to label genetically modified ingredients on Thursday, when both Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives voted to pass a bill that cleared the Senate last week.
The bill would require all food companies to label products with GMO ingredients but allow them to slap a barcode or a scannable QR code if they prefer that to simple words or a symbol. It now heads to President Obama who will almost certainly sign it. The U.S. Department of Agriculture will have to figure out what needs to be labeled as a GMO under the bill, a tricky job, to say the least.
This is just a quick update on something we’ve been writing about for a long time. Here’s some more:
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Senate passes GMO-labeling bill
Senate passes GMO-labeling bill
By Nathanael Johnsonon Jul 6, 2016Share
The Senate just voted to usher in nationwide mandatory labeling of genetically modified foods.
The bill, passed Wednesday with strong Republican support, requires food companies to tell consumers if there are any genetically engineered ingredients in their products. Companies wouldn’t necessarily need to do that by writing “contains GMOs” on the package — they could provide that information with a scannable QR code and small businesses could comply by simply providing a phone number or website. More details here.
Republicans did most of the heavy lifting: 47 voted for the measure along with 18 Democrats, giving it enough votes to withstand a filibuster.
Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), who brokered the deal to get the bill passed, called it a victory for farmers and consumers. “I worked to ensure that any agreement would recognize the scientific consensus that biotechnology is safe, while also making sure consumers have the right to know what is in their food,” Stabenow said, in a statement. “I also wanted a bill that prevents a confusing patchwork of 50 different rules in each state.”
The bill is a compromise, so of course people from both sides of the debate have attacked it. Senator Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) voted against the measure because he believes mandatory labels should be reserved for products that have been shown to harm health. “I fear that this approach puts us on a path that will ultimately hurt Nebraskans by putting a liberal agenda ahead of sound science,” he told the Lincoln Journal Star.
On the other side, Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted that the bill was “confusing, misleading and unenforceable.”
Sanders opposes the bill in part because it would pre-empt a law passed in his home state of Vermont that requires a written label instead of a scannable code.
So, both pro and anti-GMO partisans oppose the bill, but there are a lot of folks in the middle that support it, including everyone from the Organic Trade Association to the generally conservative American Farm Bureau Federation.
The House has already passed a GMO-labeling bill, one that calls for voluntary, rather than mandatory, labeling. The two are different enough that they can’t be reconciled, so that means the House will have to pass yet another bill before this Senate bill could become law.
There’s a pretty good chance that the House will pass a carbon copy of the Senate bill soon. I expect the majority of representatives will eventually come around to the compromise, because the alternative — having labeling rules that vary from state to state — would cause trouble for companies selling food across state lines.
Some companies have already decided not to sell in Vermont, and others have slapped GMO-labels on their products no matter where they are sold. The Vermont law went into effect July 1, but the state won’t begin enforcing it until the end of the year.
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General Mills is doing GMO labeling, because it’s just easier
General Mills is doing GMO labeling, because it’s just easier
By Nathanael Johnsonon 18 Mar 2016commentsShare
General Mills announced Friday that it would start labeling its products containing genetically modified ingredients. You’ll see them on packaging soon, and you can already check the status of your Count Chocula Cereal and Nature Valley Granola Bars at a company website. The move comes ahead of a Vermont law mandating GMO labels in that state, and because there is no easy way to separate products going to one state, the company decided to add labels nationwide.
“We can’t label our products for only one state without significantly driving up costs for our consumers and we simply will not do that,” wrote Jeff Harmening, General Mills’ chief operating officer, on the food giant’s blog.
The announcement follows a failed bid earlier this week by Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) to fast-track a bill that would have blocked the Vermont labeling law. The Senate shot down that bill on Wednesday. But the measure is likely to re-emerge in coming months, and could still pass. Apparently, “likely” and “could” aren’t reassuring enough for General Mills.
With the exception of organic companies, the food industry had been united in pushing against mandatory labeling of genetically engineered ingredients. But as the Vermont law comes into effect July 1, companies are beginning to break ranks.
Campbell’s Soup announced earlier this year that it would begin labeling its GMO products, and support either a mandatory labeling law or a voluntary labeling law, as long as it established a national standard. Now General Mills seems to have decided that it can’t gamble on Congress providing a deus ex machina, and followed the lead of Campbell’s Soup. It’s likely that more will join them.
Companies that were marching together are now breaking out of formation. If each company goes its own way there will be much less pressure on Congress to pass a bill blocking labeling.
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General Mills is doing GMO labeling, because it’s just easier
WTF Happened to Golden Rice?
Mother Jones
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Like the hover boards of the Back to the Future franchise, golden rice is an old idea that looms just beyond the grasp of reality.
“This Rice Could Save a Million Kids a Year,” announced a Time Magazine cover back in 2000. Orange in color, the rice is genetically modified to contain a jolt of beta-carotene, the stuff that gives carrots their hue and that our bodies transform into vitamin A. Diets deficient in that key micronutrient are the leading cause of blindness of children in the global south, where rice tends to be a staple grain. A decade and a half since the Time article, golden rice has yet to be planted commercially—but it continues generating bumper crops of hype. “Is Golden Rice the Future of Food?” the great hipster-foodie journal Lucky Peach wondered last fall, adding that “it might save millions from malnutrition.”
If golden rice is such a panacea, why does it flourish only in headlines, far from the farm fields where it’s intended to grow? The short answer is that the plant breeders have yet to concoct varieties of it that work as well in the field as existing rice strains. This is made all the more challenging in the face of debates over genetically modified crops and eternal disputes about how they should be regulated.
After seed developers first create a genetically modified strain with the desired trait—in this case, rice with beta carotene—they then start crossing it into varieties that have been shown to perform well in the field. The task is tricky: When you tweak one thing in a genome, such as giving rice the ability to generate beta-carotene, you risk changing other things, like its speed of growth. The University of Washington anthropologist and long-time golden rice observer Glenn Stone describes this process as “bringing a superfood down to earth,” and it gets little attention in most media accounts.
The most serious effort to commercialize golden rice is centered at the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the globe’s most prestigious incubator of high-yielding rice varieties. Launched with grants from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations in 1960, IRRI spearheaded the Asian part of what became known as the Green Revolution—the effort to bring US-style industrial agriculture to the developing world. (My review of Nick Cullather’s excellent Green Revolution history The Hungry World is here.)
Today, IRRI coordinates the Golden Rice Network and has been working to develop a viable strain since 2006. And so far, it’s having trouble. On its website, IRRI reports that in the field latest trials, golden rice varieties “showed that beta carotene was produced at consistently high levels in the grain, and that grain quality was comparable to the conventional variety.” However, the website continues, “yields of candidate lines were not consistent across locations and seasons.” Translation: The golden rice varieties exhibited what’s known in agronomy circles as a “yield drag”—they didn’t produce as much rice as the non-GM varieties they’d need to compete with in farm fields. So the IRRI researchers are going back to the drawing board.
Via email, I asked IRRI how that effort is going. “So far, both agronomic and laboratory data look very promising,” a spokeswoman replied. But she declined to give a time frame for when IRRI thinks it will have a variety that’s ready for prime time. Washington University’s Stone says he visited IRRI’s campus in the Philippines in the summer of 2015 and heard from researchers that such a breakthrough is “at least several more years” off. The IRRI spokeswoman also declined to comment on Stone’s time-frame report.
That’s not a very inspiring assessment, given that researchers first successfully inserted the beta-carotene trait in the rice genome in 2000, and that the technology has been lavished with research support ever since—including from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative), USAID, the Syngenta Foundation, and others, according to the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board.
Of course, among people who think biotechnology has a crucial role to play in solving developing-world malnutrition, IRRI’s agronomic struggles are compounded by anti-GMO zealotry as well as what it sees as over-regulation of GMOs in the global south. David Zilberman, an agricultural economist at the University of California at Berkeley, points out that most developing-world nations, including the Philippines, have adopted the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which stipulates a precautionary approach to introducing new GMO products, including restrictions on how trials are conducted. The Cartagena regime stands in sharp contrast to the much more laissez-faire one that holds sway in the United States, Zilberman says.
If the developing world embraced US-style regulation and treated vitamin A deficiency as a medical emergency solvable by golden rice, “it would have become available in 2000” Zilberman says. Based on that premise, he and German agricultural economist Justus Wesseler co-authored a 2014 paper claiming that golden rice has “been available since early 2000” and opposition to it has resulted in “about 1.4 million life years lost over the past decade in India” alone. Such claims abound in pro-GM circles. At a speech at the University of Texas last year, the Nobel laureate British biochemist Sir Richard Roberts accused gold rice opponents of have having committed a “crime against humanity.”
To be sure, opposition to golden rice has occasionally gone overboard. In 2013, activists destroyed one of of IRRI’s golden rice field trials in the Philippines, for example. “Anti-GMO activism has set back our work, in that we not only concentrate with our research, but we have to also spend time and resources to counter their propaganda,” the IRRI spokesperson told me. But the group makes clear that regulation and activism are only two of the challenges facing golden rice—getting it to perform well remains a major task.
Even if and when IRRI does come up with a high-yielding golden rice variety that passes regulatory muster, it remains unclear whether it can actually make a dent in vitamin A deficiency. As the Washington University’s Stone notes, vitamin A deficiency often affects people whose diets are also deficient in other vital nutrients. Vitamin A is fat soluble, meaning that it can’t be taken up by the body unless it’s accompanied by sufficient dietary fat, which isn’t delivered in significant quantities by rice, golden or otherwise.
According to Stone, only one feeding study (PDF) has ever showed a powerful uptake of vitamin A by subjects eating golden rice. The paper was much-cited by golden rice proponents, but Stone says it had a major flaw: The subjects were “well-nourished individuals” who already took in sufficient fat in their diets. The study “demonstrated only that Golden Rice worked in children who did not need it,” he writes. (The study has since been retracted on claims that the author failed to obtain proper consent from the parents of the participants).
Meanwhile, as IRRI scrambles to perfect golden rice, the prevalence of vitamin A deficiency is declining in the Philippines—according to IRRI itself— from 40 percent of children aged 6 months to 5 years in 2003, to 15.2 percent in 2008. “The exact reasons for these improvements have not been determined, but they may be the results of proven approaches to preventing vitamin A deficiency, such as vitamin A supplementation, dietary diversification, food fortification and promotion of optimal breastfeeding,” the group noted. That drop is part of a long-term trend that involves all of Southeast Asia. According to a 2015 Lancet study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, vitamin A deficiency plagued 39 percent of children in the region in 1991, but only 6 percent in 2013—without the help of golden rice.
But VAD, as the deficiency’s known, remains a huge scourge on the Indian sub-continent and in Africa, the study found, affecting more than 40 percent of children in both regions. Whether golden rice will ever help mitigate that ongoing tragedy won’t likely be known for some time. But the technology’s hardly the slam-dunk panacea its advocates insist it is.
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When "Top Chef" Star Tom Colicchio Went to Washington
Mother Jones
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On a fall day in a congressional office bedecked with University of Oregon (Go Ducks!) paraphernalia, Tom Colicchio and Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) were getting on like old college buddies.
Up on Alaska’s Mohawk River, the congressman insisted, you can still spear salmon with a pitchfork. “I was in Juneau half an hour and caught 30 fish,” countered Colicchio, the smooth-domed celebrity chef, who’d chosen a navy blazer for the occasion. “I said, ‘Nah, this isn’t fun anymore, this is boring.'” But Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo’s Top Chef and founder of the New York City restaurants Gramercy Tavern, Craft, and Colicchio & Sons (his boys are 3, 5, and 21)—wasn’t here simply for the pleasantries.
More than 700 chefs had already signed a petition supporting a DeFazio-sponsored bill, currently stalled in the House with 67 cosponsors, that would require food manufacturers to disclose their GMO ingredients. A subset of the signatories were on the Hill to lobby legislators and staffers. “As chefs, we know that choosing the right ingredients is an absolutely critical part of cooking,” the petition reads. “But when it comes to whether our ingredients contain genetically modified organisms, we’re completely in the dark.” The chefs were joined by reps from activist groups—including Food Policy Action, the Center for Food Safety, a national campaign called Just Label It, and the Environmental Working Group—to address the issues of transparency, food safety, and the massive amounts of money ($36 million in the last election) the food industry has spent fighting GMO-labeling initiatives.
Invited to observe the meeting with DeFazio, I took advantage of the chance to give Colicchio a light grilling. Here are a few tidbits Colicchio gave me on some of his favorite topics:
On states rights: “We typically label things not because they’re dangerous. If they’re dangerous, we take them out of the food supply. But we believe everything in our processed foods should be labeled.
 Like some labels say “modified food starch.” Why modified? It’s been altered. I’m not asking for a skull and crossbones—simply a line in the ingredient list that says ‘GMO corn.’ That’s it!
“We’re not debating the science of GMOs, but I would say there’s an ever-increasing environmental issue because of the overuse of herbicides. If you look at the health of the soil, if you care about the environment, how much carbon is in the ground, you wanna know what’s in your food.
 This is a recent development, where people in the food industry are starting to care about the policies behind these issues. Typically consumers who care about food, they’re not thinking about policy. Like when they go to a farmers market, they’re probably paying more—there are policies that are keeping those foods more expensive than processed ones. I don’t quite understand how people who care about states’ rights all of the sudden don’t believe states have a right to label. Those same people will say the states have a right to raise animals a certain way. Where did all the states’ rights people go? I want them! They’re somewhere in this building!”
On customer confusion: “I always use this example: It’s summer, and you go into the supermarket and see all the beautiful strawberries. One is labeled local. One is labeled organic and ‘made in Chile’—it’s GMO free, but people don’t know that. People will go, ‘Oh, that one’s local, so I’ll buy that.’ That lack of transparency puts the organic farmer at a competitive disadvantage.”
On getting his kids thinking about (and actually eating) good food: “I find that the trick to get them to eat is to bring them shopping. I started gardening this year, and they are so interested in watching stuff grow. And I want to teach them patience, because they’re so focused on immediate response of hitting a button and something happens. My older son really loves food and really cares about it. He isn’t into policy yet, but we had a food policy booth set up at Lollapalooza, and he manned it this year because I couldn’t get there. I had to entice him with lots of free music.”
On his own childhood dinners: “We had a family that had to be at the table at a certain time every single night. I don’t think I was a picky eater. I don’t remember. The only thing I do remember is my older brother would constantly steal the food off my plate.”
On his earliest cooking mishap:
 “I would bake a lot with my grandmother. I grew up in a four-family home in New Jersey. There were two homes on the plot and my grandparents lived in the other building. So I made this blueberry pie and I had to walk it a couple hundred yards to the side house. We’re on the second floor, and my grandmother insisted that I put it in a brown paper bag and hold it straight. I kept saying, “Oh, it’ll be okay.” I run home, upstairs. I take it out, big moment, and the blueberries all flew out of the pie!”
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GMO-free cereal? Middle America shrugs
GMO-free cereal? Middle America shrugs
25 Sep 2014 4:07 PM
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GMO-free cereal? Middle America shrugs
It’s starting to look like the average eater doesn’t care about GMOs.
At the very beginning of 2014, General Mills announced that it was making its original Cheerios without any genetically engineered ingredients. Back then, I wrote:
The company said it’s not responding to pressure; rather, it’s interested in the possibility that customers might “embrace” (i.e. buy more) GM-free Cheerios. Even if that’s true, activists may have rallied enough interest to get General Mills’ attention, and I suspect that the company wants to try labeling as an experiment. Will a non-GM label increase sales? Will customers pay a higher price? The answers to these questions will be valuable to the company in planning for the possibility of labeling laws.
So what data is this experiment generating? Well, in March, General Mills said that it had gotten a lot of positive publicity but so far had seen no increase in sales. That was too short a window of time to reach any conclusions; I wanted to wait and see what happened.
A few days after the General Mills announcement, and without any media fanfare, Post Foods put a GMO-free label on its Grape Nuts. While Cheerios boxes noted their GMO-free status discreetly on the side panel below the nutrition facts, Grape Nuts put a Non-GMO Project sticker on front. Now that’s a more interesting experiment: Do customers know/care enough to look for GMO information? Does slapping a notice on the front of a box change anything?
We received a little more data the other day, when 98 percent of General Mills shareholders voted against going GMO-free with the rest of its foods. When I asked General Mills how Cheerios sales were, they gave me exactly the same line they’d been saying since March: “The consumer response has been largely positive, but we really haven’t seen any positive impact on sales.”
I don’t have data on Grape Nuts sales yet. But that’s a brand that Post has been trying to resuscitate for years.
I’ve asked Post if it will tell us more. In the meantime, here’s what I think is going on: People who know and care about GMOs aren’t likely to buy Cheerios in the first place.
I should know. In my household as a kid, cereal in general was suspect because it was so often a vehicle for sugar. And even low-sugar options, like Cheerios and Grape Nuts (suggested motto: “Like sit-ups for your mouth — you know it’s healthy when it makes you hurt”) seemed like half-hearted, mass-market substitutes. If we wanted healthy cereal, we’d barter for granola handcrafted by Waldorf school students.
I’m guessing General Mills is probably on the right track. GMO-concerned eaters want more than a label — they want brands that reflect their own culture, like, say, Annie’s Homegrown. Didn’t some company just buy it?
More by Nathanael Johnson← PreviousCargill promises to stop chopping down rainforests. This is huge.
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How Dr. Bronner’s Soap Turned Activism Into Good Clean Fun
Mother Jones
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CEO David Bronner shows off his company’s suds-spewing fire truck. Gregg Segal
It’s 6 a.m. and my head is splitting from the roar of David Bronner’s Vitamix blender pulverizing frozen berries and hemp milk. The 40-year-old CEO of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps—who looks like a raver version of Captain Jack Sparrow—kept me up past midnight drinking beers, smoking spliffs, and listening to Deltron 3030 and Gorillaz as he regaled me with stories about LSD trips in Burning Man’s Sanctuary tent and his early days as a squatter and club kid in Amsterdam. Shivering out from under the Mexican blanket in his guest bedroom, I dimly recall the two of us dancing in his backyard and expounding upon the hugeness of the universe. “You’ve got to come to our board meeting tomorrow morning,” Bronner told me at some point between the vegan tapas and my fifth Amstel Light.
But the Advil still hasn’t kicked in as we load his extra longboard (“the Shredder”) into his pickup and roll down the hill to Carlsbad’s Terramar Beach, where we meet a crew of Bronner employees and Bronner brahs—including Mike Hynson, the son of the pro surfer featured in the 1966 cult classic The Endless Summer. Out past the breakers, Bronner starts egging me on as a huge wave approaches: “Go Josh! Go!” I flail desperately, wheezing my way into position atop a glassy wall cresting with foam.
It’s been just 21 hours since I showed up at the hive of cheap warehouses that serves as Dr. Bronner’s global HQ and found the CEO at his flimsy Ikea-style desk, ignoring business calls. An amulet dangled on a hemp necklace over his tie-dyed shirt as he leaned in toward his computer screen, staring at what really mattered to him: the latest internal poll for Washington Initiative 522, a ballot measure to require the labeling of foods containing genetically modified organisms that was coming up for a vote the following month. The initiative, which voters ultimately rejected, was among the costliest in state history: Its backers raised $8 million while its foes in biotech and Big Food poured nearly three times as much into its defeat. Dr. Bronner’s alone donated $2.2 million to the Yes on 522 campaign—after sinking $620,000 into a similar California ballot measure in 2012. “If we don’t win the right to label and enable people to choose non-GMO,” Bronner told me, “then everything is going to be GMO.”
The GMO battle is just the latest in a line of feisty political campaigns waged by the lovably weird cleaning products dynasty, best known for its tingly peppermint liquid soap with the earnestly logorrheic label. (“Absolute cleanliness is Godliness! Teach the Moral ABC that unites all mankind free, instantly 6 billion strong we’re All-One.”) Since its founding in 1948 by Bronner’s grandfather, the Southern California company has become a soapbox for a variety of causes—from its founder’s religious universalism to its recent campaigns to legalize hemp and marijuana, clean up fair trade and organic standards, and combat income inequality. Activism and charitable donations consume about half of the company’s healthy profits. “If we are not maxed out and pushing our organization to the limit, then what are we doing?” Bronner asks.
Embracing lefty lifestyle politics might not seem like the best way to grow a business—until you sit on the orange velour couch in Bronner’s Tibetan-flag-draped office in Escondido and watch the phone light up with calls from buyout firms. In the 15 years since he took over, annual sales have grown 1,300 percent, from $5 million to $64 million. Along the way, the company’s castile soaps have gone from hippie niche products to staples on the aisles at Target. And yet Bronner says he has twice refused offers from Walmart to carry his soaps, even at the undiscounted wholesale price, because he can’t stomach the chain’s politics and crummy worker pay. The best way to go mainstream, he has found, is to be as unapologetically countercultural as possible.
At a time when companies strive to concoct “brand stories” of authenticity and altruism, Dr. Bronner’s succeeds by being itself. “Their activism as a company is not engineered; it wasn’t coached by a public relations firm,” says Joel Solomon, the president of Renewal Partners, a venture capital firm that invests in socially responsible businesses. “Dr. Bronner’s does their thing the way they think it should be done, and nobody is going to change them.”
The company shares a niche with progressive rabble-rousers like Working Assets (annual sales: $100 million) and Patagonia ($540 million), but no other brand can match its idiosyncratic story. Emanuel Heilbronner was born into a German Jewish family of soap factory owners in 1908 and immigrated to the United States in 1929. His parents died in Nazi concentration camps, and he dropped “Heil” from his last name because of its associations with Hitler. More interested in godliness than cleanliness, Bronner—who wasn’t really a doctor—invented a Judeo-Unitarian pop religious philosophy, publicizing its tenets on the labels of the soap bottles that he gave away at his lectures. He became so obsessed with spreading his All-One faith that he and his sickly wife put their three children in foster homes for long stretches so he’d have more time to travel and speak. In 1945, he was arrested after a particularly fervent speech at the University of Chicago and committed to a mental hospital for two months. He escaped and fled to Los Angeles, where he founded Dr. Bronner’s All-One God Faith, which now does business as Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps.
Dr Bronner’s founder Emanuel Bronner (left and left in family photo) was the son of a soapmaker who was killed by the Nazis. The company was revitalized by his son Jim (left, with brother Ralph.) Courtesy of the Bronner family.
“The soap was there to sell his message,” David Bronner tells me, “and if you didn’t want to hear it, he didn’t want to sell to you.” Emanuel Bronner’s cosmic ideals and his soap’s 18 suggested uses (contraceptive douche!) found a following among hikers and commune dwellers, even though he was hardly a flower child; he hated communists and never smoked pot. His son Jim rejected his father’s mystical ramblings and went to work for a chemical company, where he developed a firefighting foam for Monsanto that still doubles as fake snow on movie sets. But in 1988, he stepped in to rescue Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps after it lost its nonprofit status and declared bankruptcy, recapitalizing it as a for-profit company.
David Bronner, Jim’s son, wasn’t sure he wanted to become the next standard-bearer for a soap-making dynasty. After graduating from Harvard in 1995 with a biology degree, he immersed himself in Amsterdam’s drug culture. “I just had my life explode on many levels of identity,” he recalls of a late-night ecstasy and acid trip at a gay trance club. These experiences, as well as the writings of authors such as Noam Chomsky and Paul Hawken, eventually opened his eyes to the value of his grandfather’s All-One philosophy and the power of the soap company as a vehicle for change. In 1997, he let his dad know that he was ready to work for the family business, but only “on activist terms.”
A year later, Jim Bronner died of lung cancer and David, just 25, took over as CEO. He decided early on that he’d rather feel good about his job than worry about making a ton of money. In 1999, he capped the company’s top salary at five times that of the lowest-paid warehouse worker—Bronner now makes about $200,000 a year. He has hired a lot of people he met at Burning Man, including Tim Clark (official title: Foam Maestro), a muscular guy whose job mostly consists of driving a psychedelic, soapsuds-spewing fire truck to music festivals. That’s about as close as the company gets to actual marketing. “We’re basically like a nonprofit,” Bronner explained as we grabbed coffee in the office of his mom, Trudy, the firm’s chief financial officer. “But we aren’t,” countered Trudy, who could easily pass for a church lady with her silver cross centered on a prim maroon turtleneck sweater. “We’re a for-profit business. And we make good money and pay our employees really well.”
Still, the minuscule ad budget and cap on executive pay leave the company with plenty of cash to improve its products and fund social campaigns—goals that, as luck or savvy would have it, often go hand in hand. At one point, for example, Bronner decided to add a new ingredient, hemp oil, which gave the soap a smoother lather. But there was a hitch: Not long after he acquired a huge stockpile of Canadian hemp oil, the Bush administration outlawed most hemp products. “Technically, we were sitting on tens of thousands of pounds of Schedule I narcotics,” he recalls.
Rather than destroy his inventory, Bronner sued the Drug Enforcement Administration to change its stance on hemp, a nonpsychoactive strain of cannabis. Hemp oil contains so little THC that you’d have to consume a bathtub full of the stuff to get high. To press the point, Adam Eidinger, who has since become the company’s “director of social activism,” set up in front of DEA headquarters and served agents free bagels with poppy seeds (which in theory could be used to make heroin) and orange juice (which naturally contains trace amounts of alcohol). In 2004, a federal court sided with the company and struck down the ban.
Three years later Dr. Bronner’s, by then the world’s first certified-organic soap company, sued rivals such as Kiss My Face and Avalon Organics for falsely advertising their products as organic. (The suit, rendered largely moot after Whole Foods began policing the organic claims of its personal-care suppliers, was ultimately dismissed.) When Bronner couldn’t find certified-organic and fair-trade sources for palm, coconut, and olive oil, he grew his own in Ghana and Sri Lanka, and scaled up existing projects in Israel and the West Bank. Coconut oil now accounts for 12 percent of Dr. Bronner’s sales, almost as much as bar soap.
In recent years, Bronner has been arrested twice for his activism. In 2009, he planted hemp seeds on the lawn of DEA headquarters in Washington, DC, to protest a ban on domestic cultivation. He was busted again in 2012 for milling hemp oil in front of the White House—he’d set up shop in a cage, and police had to saw through the bars to take him into custody. Next he hopes to partner with renegade farmers to manufacture America’s first line of domestically grown hemp-based foods. “The activism side of the company enables us to take risks that no sane company would,” Bronner says. “The point of what we are doing is to fight, and the products serve that.”
Nowhere has that attitude been more evident than in the Washington GMO battle. While many organics companies contributed money to the campaign, Dr. Bronner’s temporarily turned its soap label into a Yes on 522 ad, and ran it in magazines (including Mother Jones). “Taking sides on a political campaign like that is totally unprecedented in the world of product labeling,” Robert Parker, the president of the company that prints Dr. Bronner’s labels, told me as we bobbed in the waves off Terramar Beach.
David Bronner Gregg Segal
On the day I met Bronner, his activism director Eidinger was arrested for a Yes Men-style stunt lampooning the biotech industry’s clout in Washington, DC. Posing as a Monsanto lobbyist, he entered a Senate office building and dumped $2,000 in singles—”enough to look like money raining down,” he later explained—from a balcony. Eidinger is also the brains behind the anti-GMO group Occupy Monsanto and a fleet of cute “Fishy Food” art cars (Fishy Sugar Beet, Fishy Tomato, etc.) that Dr. Bronner’s commissioned to drive cross-country and make light of how transgenic crops sometimes incorporate fish genes. “I have no in-principle objection to genetic engineering or synthetic biology,” Bronner insists, citing his biology background and his dad’s work for Monsanto. His real problem with GMOs has less to do with Frankenfood fears than with the documented effects of herbicide- and pest-resistant GM crops, which were sold as a way to reduce harmful spraying. Studies have found that they’ve instead given rise to new superbugs and superweeds that demand ever-stronger pesticides and herbicides. “Far from freeing us from the chemical treadmill,” Bronner says, “GMOs are doubling down on it.”
His loss to the biotech industry in Washington state hasn’t dampened Bronner’s lust for battle. “If this was 2016″—a presidential election year—”we would have destroyed them,” he says, blaming low turnout for the measure’s defeat. “And that’s what we are going to do.” (A second try in California could be next, Eidinger says.)
Before we headed to his house, Bronner took me to see the company’s future headquarters—a bright, 120,000-square-foot warehouse a few hundred yards down the road from a Home Depot. There, Bertine Kabellis, his spunky, Haitian-born factory manager, details what they’re doing to turn the bland corporate space into something more homey. The factory store will include a “fragrance bar,” a soap-bottle refill station, and a hemp activism diorama featuring a Bronner look-alike mannequin sorting through cannabis plants in a cage. The store, Kabellis enthuses, will also carry Dr. Bronner-branded pinhole glasses—which create strange visual effects.
“Leopard-print Speedos?” Bronner asks, out of the blue. “Which I have to get for Palm Springs Pride. I’m gonna rock ’em.”
As Kabellis explains the layout of the organic farm-to-table employee cafeteria, Bronner interrupts. He wants to show us a photo he’s just received on his phone: It’s Eidinger in his business suit, making snow angels in a big pile of dollar bills.
“That’s so ridic-u-lous!” Bronner intones, beaming as he slips the phone back into his baggy hemp trousers. “It’s so rad!”
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Vermont to Pass GMO Labeling!
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