Girl Scouts cookies ‘contaminated’ with pesticides, claims complaint

Topline

A new lawsuit claims that biscuits that the scouts sold include “dangerous” heavy metals and pesticides, although the youth organization has contested the demands on defending their popular product, which spends hundreds of million dollars every year.

Key facts

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Chief critic

In a blog post in February, the scouts denied the claims from the study and argued that heavy metals appear naturally in the ground and that glyphosate is “widespread” in agriculture and “found almost everywhere in the food chain”. The non -profit organization added that its bakers had confirmed that the values ​​reported in the study “do not represent a problem with food safety for our customers”, although the complaint claimed that Girl Scouts’ blog post “addresses the tests themselves or the need to remember the products”.

What is glyphosate?

Glyphosate is used as a herbicide to control weeds and grasses, and according to the EPA, it is often used in the production of fruit, vegetables, nuts, corn and soybeans. When used, glyphosate sticks on the ground before it is quickly broken down by bacteria, although consumers are exposed to “very small quantities” for the control and prevention of diseases. A study published by the agency in 2022 showed that around 81% of the US population were exposed to glyphosate between 2013 and 2014. Nausea, vomiting and respiratory problems are likely to be symptoms when a large amount of glyphosate is consumed and some health groups examine whether the pesticide causes cancer.

Key background

The girl scouts throw their girl scout cookie program as “the largest entrepreneurial program in the world”, with several cookie aromas being sold every year from January to April. The program, which started in 1917, takes over around 200 million boxes of cookies, which corresponds to a turnover of around 800 million US dollars. The scouts have increased prices for some of their biscuits in recent years to combat inflation, although the group also had problems with workers and problems of the supply chain, including power failures in baking devices in 2023.

tangent

Hershey was sued in December 2022 after a resident of New York claimed that in some of its chocolates, the company had not disclosed “uncertain lead and cadmium”. The lawsuit followed consumer reports in which some of Hershey’s dark chocolate products exceeded the California standards for lead and cadmium doses. The lawsuit has not yet been concluded (Hershey did not answer immediately when asked about comments from Forbes).

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