Better-for-You Brands Unite to Create the Good Food Collective
Founding members GoodPop, LesserEvil, Quinn and Evergreen have officially launched the Good Food Collective (GFC), a coalition of leading food brands, organizations and experts taking bolder steps to advocate for greater transparency, higher standards and innovation in the food industry.
GFC aims to harnesses the collective power of like-minded brands to push for greater clarity and integrity in food labeling, ingredient standards and consumer education. The collective's ultimate goal is empowering and enabling busy consumers to make informed, conscious food choices at the grocery store without the burden of decoding complex and misleading labels.
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"We believe that every person deserves access to honest, transparent information about the food they consume," said Daniel Goetz, founder and CEO of Austin, Texas-based GoodPop. "By raising our standards across the board, we can create a healthier, more informed future for all consumers. Our goal is to advocate for regulation that both encourages fair play and allows for innovation. This has been a goal of mine since I founded GoodPop, and I'm honored to tackle it with the strength of the collective."
"LesserEvil is on a perpetual mission to make healthy, organic, less-processed and sustainable snacks more accessible to everyone," said Charles Coristine, president and CEO of Danbury, Conn.-based LesserEvil. "In our perfect world, every consumer would have access to healthy snacks and the resources to know exactly what goes into every item they're feeding to their families and themselves – from sourcing to packaging and everything in between. That's why we're so excited to be a part of the Good Food Collective with GoodPop; their mission echoes our own, and we're confident that together, we'll be able to make a real difference."
The collective's first major initiative focuses on improving nutrition labels. Earlier this month, the GFC submitted a formal comment to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's proposed rule on Front-of-Pack Nutrition Labeling, emphasizing the need for more effective consumer-friendly warnings and education for products high in added sugars, sodium and saturated fats.
Boulder, Colo.-based branding and design agency Interact Brands, a fellow GFC member, created a proposed label including a graphic QR code from which consumers can easily access nutritional information and learn about the risks of consuming excess added sugars, sodium and saturated fats.
The group submitted its recommendations for an alternative nutrition label before the FDA's public-comment deadline, which closed on July 15.
Meanwhile, GFC has a goal of recruiting at least 30 members by the end of 2025.
Other current members include Actual Veggies, Sweet Nothings, Daily Crunch, Rudi's Bakery, New Primal, Dr. Praeger's, Sunnie, Little Sesame, Harken Sweets, Lentiful, Paktli, Sattva Vida, Brass Roots, I Eat My Greens, Globowl, Huxley, ZICO, Plantstrong and Culture Pop Soda.
