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        Below from Natural News.

        Bait-&-Switch is loathsome, especially when it comes to organic food.   The article below does not address the question which I feel is MOST important.   Are the soybeans used in the Dean soymilk now GMO beans?

        Dean Foods owns Horizon.    I stopped buying Horizon dairy products when I discovered the milk comes from cows in feedlots with no access to pasture.

With consumer demand for organic products continuing to grow, more large corporations are entering the organic market. To maximize profits, some of these companies don't follow organic standards but still label products as organic. For example, Horizon Organic and Aurora Organic, sold by Wal-Mart and other retailers, continue to produce "organic" milk under factory-farm conditions that few reasonable people would consider truly organic.

According to the Organic Consumers Association, half of Horizon's "organic" milk today comes from what can only be considered "factory" dairy feedlots -- and much of Aurora's organic milk does as well. Rather than buy organic calves that have been raised from birth on organic farms, these companies seemed to have discovered it's cheaper to buy conventional calves that have been raised on conventional farms, install them in factory feedlots, then milk them and call it organic.

The situation has become so alarming that the Organic Consumers Association ultimately called for a boycott, and many knowledgeable consumers are now avoiding the Horizon brand entirely.

=======================================================

Dean Foods pulls bait-and-switch on "organic" Silk soymilk
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
by: Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) Until early 2009, Silk brand soy milk was made using organic soybeans. But earlier this year, Dean Foods (owner of the Silk brand) quietly switched to conventional soybeans, which are often grown with pesticides. But they kept the same UPC barcodes on their products, and they kept the product label virtually the same, only replacing the word "organic" with "natural" in a way that was barely noticeable. They also kept the price the same, charging consumers "organic" prices for a product that was now suddenly made with conventionally-grown soybeans.

Many retailers and consumers never noticed the bait-and-switch tactic, so they kept buying Silk, thinking it was still organic. The shift on the product label from "organic" to "natural" wasn't well understood by consumers, either. Many consumers continue to think that the term "natural" is basically the same as "organic," when in fact they are almost opposites. The term "natural" is entirely unregulated, and almost anything can be claimed to be "natural" even when it's sprayed with pesticides or treated with other chemicals.

This bait-and-switch ploy continued throughout 2009 until a few watchdog organizations started to catch on to the covert switch. In late October, the Cornucopia Institute (www.Cornucopia.org) accused Target stores of misleading consumers by advertising Silk products using the old "organic" labeling even though the product being sold in stores was not organic. Cornucopia's Mark Kastel accused Target and Dean Foods for "blurring the line between organic and natural," thereby confusing consumers while boosting profits from the more lucrative sales of non-organic products sold at organic prices. (http://www.cornucopia.org/2009/10/o...)

Meanwhile, a Sunflower health food store in Texas also found itself caught up in the bait-and-switch tactic. It had been reordering Silk for months, thinking the product was still organic. But now, after discovering the scam, the store posts a hand-written sign in front of the Silk products, warning consumers with this message: "Silk is no longer organic."

"We don't want to be part of customer deception," said the store owner in a Star-Telegram interview.

According to that same story, food retailers in California, Delaware and Texas were also duped by Silk's bait-and-switch scheme, only discovering the switch to conventional soybeans months after the switch was covertly made. Dean Foods, you see, never bothered to tell retailers they had switched from organic to conventionally-grown soybeans. They just quietly made the switch but kept the same box design and UPC codes, perhaps hoping no one would notice. And the ploy worked!

"Dean has only added to the marketplace confusion between 'natural' and 'organic,' as they definitely do not mean the same thing, and 'natural' requires no verification whatsoever," said Consumer Reports senior scientist Urvashi Rangan (see Star-Telegram article link below).

Labeling deception

Dean Foods is one of the big food giants that serves processed, factory-made foods and beverages to the American people. It's the parent company of Horizon Organic, the so-called "organic" milk maker that's been caught up in a web of deception exposed by the Organic Consumers Association (http://www.naturalnews.com/021763_o...).

The company has pushed hard to lower organic standards so that it could market products as "organic" even though they might contain questionable ingredients. When Dean Foods bought out WhiteWave, the creator of Silk soy milk, WhiteWave founder Steve Demos soon left the company in disgust, saying that "green" values had been abandoned for the sake of profit.

Dean Foods even refused to participate on a "soy scorecard" investigation undertaken by the Cornucopia Institute (http://www.naturalnews.com/026294_s...). The last thing this company wants is scrutiny of its business practices, ( Read more... )