Raise your hand if you are surprised
By Lisa Held
• In an annual report, As You Sow awarded lower scores to 10
out of 17 major food companies on their approach to mitigating pesticide risks.
• Companies are making little progress in reducing the volume of pesticides
used in the U.S. food system, despite the increase in public awareness.
• An increase in consumer pressure could push companies to improve; many
companies that scored poorly in the report are also seeing their stock prices
decrease.
In 2019, food giant General Mills debuted a
three-point strategy to reduce synthetic pesticide use within its supply
chains. The plan was to implement regenerative agriculture practices on 1
million acres of farmland by 2030, increase the use of integrated pest
management (IPM) on farms, and expand organic acreage.
More than six years later, the webpage that outlined that
plan redirects visitors to a
page on regenerative agriculture, where the word “pesticide” does not
appear.
“They are no longer aligning their regenerative agriculture
program with pesticide reduction at all, which is obviously concerning, because
what the soil science points to is that regenerative without significant
pesticide reduction is not regenerating soil health,” said Cailin Dendas, the
senior coordinator of As You Sow’s Environmental
Health Program.
Dendas is the author of a new report that found General Mills is not alone: It’s one of several food companies moving away from earlier promises to reduce pesticide use.
The annual report ranks the country’s biggest food companies on their commitments to disclosing pesticide use and reducing it in their supply chains. This year, report authors awarded lower scores to 10 out of 17 companies, concluding that “the food industry is not stagnating on pesticide risk—it is actively reversing progress it had already made.”
The report lands at a time when evidence on the health and
environmental risks of many common pesticides is rapidly mounting, with
Americans increasingly concerned about those risks.
In the past month alone, Iowa researchers put out a
report concluding that in their state “the impact of pesticide use on
cancer incidence may be similar to that of smoking.” Food & Water
Watch published
a map showing that rates of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma are elevated in
Midwest counties where glyphosate use is highest. And a new study from
researchers in Peru published in Nature found that the risk of
developing cancer in areas where pesticide exposure was more likely was 150
percent higher on average.
Following a Seattle symposium at the end of March to review
glyphosate research, leading experts from around the world declared that the evidence is
now strong enough to definitively say the use of world’s most ubiquitous
weedkiller is causing widespread health harms. In the midst of it all, the
Center for Food Safety and Center for Biological Diversity released two analyses showing
that even for pesticides that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has
determined may cause cancer, the agency almost never includes a warning.
Attributing long-term health harms to pesticide exposure is
notoriously complicated, because it’s impossible to isolate exposure to any one
chemical from other environmental exposures and risk factors. And the EPA
maintains that its processes ensure the pesticides it approves are safe when
used as directed.
Nevertheless, Dendas said all of this makes the As You Sow
report’s findings on companies moving away from goals to reduce pesticides even
more important. “It feels like a time where companies really need to step up,
and we’re seeing them turn their backs.”
‘Pesticides in the Pantry’
As You Sow, a nonprofit that uses shareholder and investor
advocacy to push companies to adopt responsible environmental and social
policies, has been tracking food companies’ pesticide commitments since 2017.
For the annual “Pesticides in the Pantry” report, Dendas
explained, her teams spend a few months digging into publicly available
documents, such as Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reports. They
compile preliminary scores for 17 companies across 27 metrics, including
whether the company has stated goals to reduce pesticide use, whether it
collects and monitors data from its suppliers, and whether it publicly
discloses any of that data on pesticide use. Then, they send what they’ve found
to the companies and give them an opportunity to respond before updating and
finalizing the scores.
This year, fewer companies than usual—about half—responded,
Dendas said.
The best possible score is 27, though most companies are far from that. From 2023 to 2026, the average score fell from 4.5 to just 3. Four companies’ scores improved in that span, but 10 saw their scores fall. And while in 2023 only one company got no points at all, five were awarded zero points this year. (NestlĂ© scored the highest—with just 10 points, up from 6 in 2023—based on practices including publicly disclosing pesticide data and requiring some farms to reduce pesticide drift.)
General Mills, known for iconic brands including Cheerios,
Bisquick, and Annie’s organic, fell the furthest. Having scored 10 points in
2023, the company received zero points this year. In other words, it has no
publicly stated goals to reduce pesticide use, no collection of pesticide use
data, and no specific policies to protect farmworkers from exposure, among
other shortcomings in the report’s rankings.
“They were, for many years, publicly disclosing the
pesticide reduction of their supply chain achieved through their organic brands
and have since even taken that down,” Dendas said. Similarly, ADM, one of the world’s largest buyers and
processors of commodity crops like corn and soybeans, declined by 6 points in
the report’s ranking after eliminating a goal it had previously set to “reduce
the usage of chemical pesticides in our key agricultural supply chains by
2030.”
Neither company responded to Civil Eats’ requests for
interviews related to the As You Sow report.
Experts note that little progress has been made in reducing
the volume of risky pesticides used across the U.S. farm landscape, despite the
increase in public awareness.
In commodity crops, for example, Bill Freese, science director at the Center for Food Safety, said herbicide use has been increasing, especially because the now long-term, widespread use of herbicides has led many weeds to develop resistance. That means farmers may now have to apply several chemicals to kill all their weeds.
At the end of March, the Environmental Working Group
(EWG) released its
annual Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce, which includes the Dirty Dozen
list of the most commonly contaminated fruits and vegetables.
The 2026 report found 75 percent of conventional produce
samples tested positive for pesticide residue.
Every year, critics of the report point to the fact that the
levels that EWG finds are generally far below what the EPA considers dangerous.
The most
recent USDA testing, for example, found that while the majority of its
produce samples contained residues, 99 percent of those were at levels below
EPA’s limits for health risks.
Regardless of the risk implications, EWG’s data points to
trends in use: That 75 percent number, like most of the measurements the
researchers compiled, was very similar to what they’ve been finding for years,
said EWG’s science analyst, Varun Subramaniam.
“The bottom line is a lot of the stats and the findings that
we put out remain pretty consistent,” he said. “A reason for that is the main
driver of changes is regulation, and unfortunately regulations at the national
scale for pesticides are pretty few and far between.”
Will More Attention to Health Risks Spur Companies to
Change?
Detailed national pesticide use data from the U.S.
Geological Survey (USGS) only goes up to 2019; more recent numbers that were
expected in September of 2025 are now likely to be published this summer,
according to a USGS spokesperson.
Meanwhile, deregulation remains a key priority of the Trump
administration, especially at
the EPA. Trump’s EPA moved more staff into the pesticide office to speed
up approvals of
new chemicals. In some cases, new chemicals may be safer than the ones they’re
replacing, but public health groups are already suing
the agency over the 2025 approval of the insecticide isocycloseram,
claiming the EPA did not factor in human health risks to organs, including the
liver and testicles.
Getting the EPA or any part of the federal government to
regulate pesticide use and push the industry toward reductions is unlikely
without a mandate from Congress.
“Very few companies will actually do the right thing without regulations because their job is to make money for their stockholders,” said Danielle Fugere, As You Sow’s president and chief counsel. “I really do believe that we need much stronger regulations, but where there is no regulation, investors can also work to say, ‘Hey, we want to have strong, long-term companies that are resilient.’”
Fugere and others said increasing consumer attention to the
issue means companies that fail to act could lose customers and, therefore,
profits. At the end of the “Pesticides in the Pantry” report, for example, the
researchers show that many of the companies that scored poorly on their metrics
were also seeing significant decreases in stock prices.
It’s not possible to draw a direct correlation between the
two issues, but Dendas said the decline is in contrast to increases in stock
prices for some companies that focus on organics. “Sprouts is one of those that
over the last five years experienced a 416 percent increase in their stock
price,” she said.
Freese, at the Center for Food Safety, said companies should
be concerned about the increasing numbers of Gen Z and health-focused shoppers,
who care deeply about avoiding pesticides.
According to EWG, about 2.8 million people viewed its
Shopper’s Guide last year.
“Using [the guide] as evidence for lobbying, for advocating for changes in regulation is super important,” Subramaniam said. But in the meantime, he added, “We believe that consumers have a right to know what’s on their food.”
Lisa Held is Civil Eats’ senior staff reporter and contributing editor.
