Shareholder Resolution Urges Safeway To Adopt GMO Labeling | Justmeans

Shareholder Resolution Urges Safeway To Adopt GMO Labeling | Justmeans:

Green Century Equity Fund recently filed a shareholder resolution to urge Safeway to voluntarily label its private line of products that contain GMOs ingredients. Safeway is one of the largest grocery store chains in North America with 1,406 stores in the U.S. and Canada. 

The Green Century Equity Fund is administered by the Green Century Capital Management.    The reason why Green Century filed the shareholder resolution is that it believes in customer choice. Or as Lucia von Reusner, Shareholder Advocate for Green Century Capital Management, said in a statement, “Customers have the right to decide for themselves whether or not to participate in the ongoing GMO experiment.”    “Good business means responding to consumer demand, and shareholders have reason to be concerned if Safeway is unwilling to provide the transparent labeling called for by over 90% of U.S. consumers,” von Reusner added.   

Safeway has a number of private products, about 8,000 of the products sold in its stores out of approximately 45,000 products. One of those private product lines is O Organics; it contains over 300 certified organic products and is USDA organic certified, which doesn’t allow GMO ingredients to be used. Safeway also has a line called Open Nature which it bills as “100 natural.” 

In a statement in October, the grocery store chain announced that Open Nature will be “entirely non-GMO” by January 2015. Open Nature already includes a “number of non-GMO products,” according to the statement.