THE LANDSCAPE OF THE PROBLEM

One of the problems we acknowledge, but do not pretend to have addressed is the matter of holding a company like Odwalla or Muir Glen responsible for the demonstrably egregious behavior of their corporate owners, like Coca Cola's death squads in Columbia, or General Mills' role in shooting down local attempts to impose stricter product labeling laws. 

This is 100% analogous to the problem of you as a shopper being held responsible for the decisions of the buyers at your coop ... in a tradition that extends at least as far back as Rochdale Principles,  through this boycott policy we, as member-owners are basically denying the legitimacy of the corporate veil and stating that it has no business in a cooperative enterprise. 

TAKING EFFECTIVE ACTION

Recognizing that the development of policies to address all of these issues was truly complicated and that we were in for more than a few month's work, the committee launched a pair of direct campaigns to confront apparent conflicts between our core values and the store's product mix:

• the first campaign addressed oversights and omissions in the Coop's Policy Governance (POGO) documents. Our POGO - based loosely on Policy Governance^® a management philosophy promoted by John Carver - was a radical set of documents that has been used to insulate the majority of the Coop's management decisions and operational policies from both its board and its member-owners. This is a fundamental change in policy that was never voted on by our membership. The Policy Selection Guidelines Committee's (PSGC) purpose and scope explicitly includes coordination with the the coop's POGO committee to harmonize the coop's historical mission and policy statements with these policy governance documents. Since the board's POGO committee had been largely dormant since the creation of the Product Selection Committee, The PSGC took the issue directly to the board and the board voted to tie the two sets of governance documents back together. This step eliminated numerous opportunities for contradiction and misunderstanding simply by requiring that operational policies be compatible with the organization's adopted mission and its principles.
  

• The second campaign was a boycott movement directed specifically at Coca Cola's products, beginning with Odwalla, a popular product line that drew several "lines in the sand" within the community, and carried approximately $80,000 in annual sales. The machine was officially labeled "Odwalla is owned by the Coca Cola Company" (this had been done previously by activists but the labeling had been treated by management as vandalism) and then, as pressure mounted, a poster was added that presented the issues with links to other organizations actively involved in Odwalla/Coca Cola boycotts. Finally, the Odwalla machine, which had previously held one of the prime locations in our store, was removed, at the direction of the Board of Directors and the poster was revised to recognize official participation by board and management.   

IMPLEMENTING A BOYCOTT POLICY

The committee completed a DRAFT boycott policy for submission to the Coop's Board at the September 2007 meeting for board review and adoption.

In Fall 2009 the first Boycott request was presented to the Board, initiated by Board Member and original Product Selections Guidelines Committee (PSGC) Board liason Janet Welch. The target of the Boycott request was Dean Foods WhiteWave Silk Soy creamer replacement products.

What had occurred was Dean Foods had swtiched from Organic to Conventional Soy in the majority of their products. Per the Food Co-op's Adopted Boycott Policy, the affected products were posted with notice of the Boycott investigation ("There will be an educational posting next to the product(s) in question informing the members of the proposed boycott, clearly stating the issues involved"), and a request went to Operations and to the Product Research Committee. Operations researched probable financial impacts and available replacement products, and PRC researched the claims and the issues. There was overlap in these investigations.

Operations predicted substantial finacial impacts would result if all WhiteWave Silk products were removed from the store And during the course of discussions with PRC, Operations began phasing out the Silk prodcuts for which replacements were available. PRC determined that there was in fact a "Bait and Switch" going on. At the time of the investigation, the Silk website promised Organic soy tested to assure that the ingredients were for non-GMO. In late 2009 this changed, and Silk apparered to have entered into a financial replartionship with Conservation International to greenwash their new international soy sourcing program. This has led to the replacement of the original advertizing material with more nuanced and less contradictory advertizing materials which state: "All Silk soybeans – certified organic and those naturally produced without the use of genetic modification (GMO) – are currently sourced in North America.": Unless one is a hardened skeptic, it is easy to miss the subtleties of Dean Food's new marketing statement. Translated it means: "only those products labeled organic (almost none of their products are now labeled organic) are made with North American sourced Soybeans AND not all their organic beans are certified non-GMO and vice versa."

The Dean Food Boycott Proposal led the PRC committee and Deb Shortess, our committee's liaison with Operations, into some very murky water. If the Co-op were to apply the standards that Operations and the PRC were now discussing involving products with ingredient switches from certified organic and/or non-GMO to the less regulated and less stringent "natural" adjective, the Co-op would be in deep trouble with our bottom line AND with our customers. The committee therefore opted to accept the strategy proposed (and already underway) by Operations to sunset all non-organic Silk products for which replacements were available, and to find replacements for those for which we did not have ready replacements within the distribution chain.

The carefully-worded boycott proposal submitted by Welsh had focused on the issue of deceptive advertising by Dean Foods and had not called for the expulsion of all products from companies who were betraying the organic industry by substituting "natural" ingredients for certifiably "organic". Nor did the proposal itself delve into the Co-op's position regarding the creeping erosion within the foods industry of replacing Organic ingredients with "natural" products--natural--a meaningless term that appears to have comparable retail cachet to organic.

The limitations imposed by the wording of the boycott proposal along with issues regarding an increasing use of the less stringent designation of "natural" were presented to the Board. In addition, the joint reports from Operations and the Committee suggested that the boycott should be dismissed because the proposal (as written) had focused on the deceptive marketing practices aspects, and Operations had assured the Committee that they had been well-informed of the changes, had not received any deceptive promotional materials, and had not sold any mislabeled Silk products.

In addition, the Committee suggested that a letter be written to Dean Foods and informing the company our boycott investigation and the membership's dissatisfaction with the retreat from organic standards through the substitution of the misleading labeling of conventional agribusiness products as a "natural". Board Members voted not to impose the boycott. Board member, Dan Goldstein, volunteered to draft a letter of complaint from the BoD to Dean Foods and to our distributors from the BoD.