Get ready for the green checkmark. You will soon see them on food and cereal boxes in your local supermarket. You'll probably see them in future commercials touting that these green checkmarks are designed to "to help shoppers easily identify smarter food and beverage choices.” It is part of the Smart Choices campaign and it is ludicrous because of the types of foods that have been approved. For example, there are Fruit Loops and Cocoa Krispies. Now those sound like things your great-grandmother used to make with fresh ingredients, don't they?
Ten companies have signed up for the Smart Choices program and include Kellogg’s, Kraft Foods, ConAgra Foods, Unilever, General Mills, PepsiCo and Tyson Foods. Companies that participate pay up to $100,000 a year to the program, with the fee based on total sales of its products that bear the seal. Interestingly enough, members of these companies have people on the Smart Choices board - so you can see the conflict of interest here. In fact, "Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, was part of a panel that helped devise the Smart Choices nutritional criteria, until he quit last September. He said the panel was dominated by members of the food industry, which skewed its decisions."
So basically we have an industry creating a bogus ranking system with a board of their own members who all stand to gain a big profit from this. It reminds me of how the four food groups were created - by the meat and dairy associations! And that took 50 years to change!
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