French dairy companyDanone, marketed in the United States as the Dannon Company, acquired Denver, CO-basedWhiteWave Foods Co.for $10.4 billion, making this the company’s biggest acquisition in a decade. With brands that include Horizon Organic milk, Wallaby Organic yogurt and Earthbound Farm packaged salad, top sellers in their category, according to WhiteWave, this deal gives Danone a chunk of the fast-growing organic food market that will likely more than double its North American revenue.

Post Holdings, Inc., and its subsidiary, Post Foods, LLC, are being sued by three separate plaintiffs for labeling, marketing and selling Shredded Wheat as “natural” despite testing positive for the herbicide glyphosate. The lawsuits were filed on June 22 by the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, by Andy Wu in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and by Robert Stephenson in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Though testing by an independent lab in California found Shredded Wheat to contain 0.18 parts per million of glyphosate, which is a level below what is allowed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Kim Richman, of The Richman Law Group, which represents OCA in the suit notes that “even at low levels, including levels below those approved by regulatory agencies, studies show that glyphosate is an endocrine disruptor.”

Portland, OR-basedBob’s Red Millunveiled a new Sourced Non-GMO Pledge logo to signify all ingredients were declared non-GMO by its suppliers “to have been made without the use of bioengineering.”

Frontier Soupsof Gurnee, IL passed all the requirements for Safe Quality Food Certification Level 2, per the ASI Food Safety, for its new facility.

Applegate Farmsof Bridgewater, NJ, announced plans to remove genetically modified organisms (GMOs) from its entire supply chain. While the company has already removed GMO ingredients from all of its products, the natural and organic brand is now focusing on animal feed, which the company called “a monumental undertaking” due to a majority of crops used for animal feed, in the United States, being genetically modified.

Published in WholeFoods Magazine September 2016