Pepsi-owned Tropicana Dips a Toe in the Big Organic Market

Sustainable Food News (subscription required) It’s hard these days to keep track of who owns what. You might think you’re making socially conscious food decisions by purchasing organic food and drinks, but when you dig a bit deeper, you might find that companies you don’t want to support own smaller companies that produce organic food. So it is with Tropicana, the largest producer of OJ in the world, owned by PepsiCo Inc, which started selling its organic brands at Whole Foods in February. Of course, organic, even from Pepsi, is better than conventional from Pepsi, but local and organic is better still.

Matt McLean, of Uncle Matt’s Organic, hopes that Tropicana’s move lends visibility to organics. “Hopefully, they will spend money promoting the sector.” And hopefully they won’t spend money lobbying to change the organic industry, like some other Big Organic brands, namely a certain dairy distributor whose name keeps coming up…we blogged on that a few weeks ago, but here’s your update.

We can’t tell you where to find organic OJ (besides Uncle Matt’s), but we can show you where to find dairy that doesn’t have any rBGH in it.