USA: Cheerios go GMO-free

General Mills has announced that they would start making their original breakfast cereals Cheerios without GMO ingredients, Rodale reports. According to General Mills, "Cheerios has always been made with whole grain oats, and there are no GMO oats. A small amount of corn starch in cooking is used, and one gram of sugar per serving. Now that corn starch comes only from non-GM corn, and the sugar is only non-GM pure cane sugar." The full information from General Mills is available here.
 

The campaign GMO Inside has been attacking the food giant's iconic cereal brand since 2012, after the company spent over US$1 million to defeat California's Proposition 37, which would have required GMOs to be labeled in the state. They were able to get 65,000 people to call and email the company and comment on Cheerios' Facebook page, demanding that they rid the cereal - often the first solid food fed to infants - of GMOs.

Similar consumer pressure on Kellogg's led the company to having all the cereals in its Kashi line certified by the nonprofit Non-GMO Project. Rodale reports. But General Mills' move to kick GMOs out of Cheerios is a hugely significant step; since General Mills is the largest packaged food company in the USA and Cheerios, its flagship brand, is the fourth best-selling cereal, according to the market researcher IRI Worldwide. The full article is available here.