April 29, 2016
Pressure Builds on Snack Food Giant PepsiCo to Drop Conflict Palm Oil
Rainforest Action Network and SumOfUs help rally 100,000s of people calling on PepsiCo to take meaningful action to halt deforestation and human rights abuses in its supply chain
London/San Francisco/New York - Across the world, hundreds of thousands of people are taking action of all kinds to demand that the snack food giant PepsiCo take real action to clean up its palm oil supply chain ahead of the company's May 4th annual shareholders meeting.
On Monday, April 25th, a high-profile protest garnered international news coverage when activists dropped a 100- foot long banner off of Pepsi's iconic sign in Queens, New York City, calling on the company to "Cut Conflict Palm Oil."
The pressure on PepsiCo continued building throughout the week as on Thursday, April 28th, the hashtag #ConflictPalmOil was connected to PepsiCo's twitter handle @PepsiCo and trended on Twitter throughout North America, garnering roughly 20,000 tweets for around the world in a single day.
"After more than three years of publicly pressuring PepsiCo to clean up the serious environmental and human rights violations in its palm oil supply chains, people across the world are saying 'enough is enough.' The ball is now in PepsiCo's court to do the right thing and come clean," said Gemma Tillack, Agribusiness Director for Rainforest Action Network (RAN).
"From major actions in the streets of New York, to attending PepsiCo's shareholder meeting, to tens of thousands of people taking action online and across social media, it is clear that PepsiCo's customers are fed up and frustrated with the company's continued inaction," said Tillack.
"Over 129,000 SumOfUs members have signed the petition calling on PepsiCo to clean up its palm oil supply chain. Thousands of SumOfUs members have joined a photo petition and an online Twitter storm to stand in solidarity with workers," said Katherine Tu, senior campaigner at SumOfUs.
"The message is clear: there is a strong movement of people demanding that PepsiCo stop exploiting workers on palm oil plantations and protect the habitats of orangutans, elephants, and other endangered species," said Tu.
PepsiCo is the major laggard in the Snack Food 20, and continues to source palm oil from unknown plantations, high risk regions and its controversial business partner in Indonesia, Indofood.
For the Snack Food 20 scorecard, and download the full report, see here:
http://www.ran.org/sf20scorecard
For SumofUs' Stop Conflict Palm Oil campaign, see here: