Who Owns Organic Food Brands?

FitSugar — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:45:00 -0700

When buying organic and natural-food brands, such as Kashi and Naked Juice, you may think you're supporting small, independent companies. But often these brands are actually owned by major conglomerates: Kellogg, in the case of Kashi, and Pepsi for Naked Juice.

I was excited to find this very cool chart in the latest issue of Good magazine, which breaks down most of the major natural brands by their corporate owners. For the details,

Naked Juice: It's Not So Naked

FitSugar — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 07:30:00 -0800

Have you guys tried Naked Juice? You'd think with a name like that, this drink would be made with just fruit juice. Even with the fine print at the bottom of the label that reads "with added ingredients" I was still more focused on the word naked, thinking this smoothie would be unadulterated. The Orange Mango Motion flavor contains a lot of added B vitamins, to give you an extra boost, but that is not all this drink contains that will charge you up.

The motion in this smoothie comes from "guarana extract" and "green tea extract." While these are natural forms of caffeine, they're still caffeine and if you drink all 15.2 fluid ounces of this juice, you'll get 86 mg of the stuff. Just for comparison, a regular cup of joe (not the suped up coffee from Starbucks) contains about 45 mg of caffeine. So this drink packs quite a punch. When they say "energy," they mean it. I just wish it were energy from the juice, not energy from caffeine.

Want to see the nutritional info? Then

FitSugar -- Healthy, happy you.

Who Owns Organic Food Brands?

Naked Juice: It's Not So Naked