Kellogg’s Shareholder: Company Is ‘Knowingly Harming Our Children’ with Additives, Dyes

This is a display of Kellogg's Fruit Loops cereal at a Costco Warehouse in Robinson T
AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar
Olivia Rondeau

Kellogg’s is facing even more backlash amidst a mass boycott of their products after one of the company’s shareholders publicly demanded accountability for the “harmful additives” in their products.

Jason Karp, founder of health food company HumanCo and investor in Kellogg’s, has teamed up with celebrity attorney Alex Spiro to get the cereal manufacturer to get rid of “harmful artificial dyes, such as Red 40, Yellow 6, and Blue 1, as well as the preservative BHT.”

“When a company is knowingly harming our children to make a little extra money, we have to stand up and do what is right,” Karp wrote in a statement on X alongside an activist letter he filed with Spiro against Kellogg’s.

The Thursday letter is demanding the company to “stop their unethical behavior of selling inferior, more harmful versions of their products to American children.”

In other countries such as Canada, Japan, and the U.K, Karp pointed out that certain additives in American Kellogg’s products are completely banned. In EU countries, food companies must put a “warning label on products with these ingredients, stating they ‘may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children,’” the investor wrote.

“Kellogg knows that these artificial additives can harm children,” Karp alleged, citing research from the Center for Science in the Public Interest that said the dyes can cause organ damage, cancer, birth defects, allergic reactions, and behavioral problems in children.

Spiro, of the Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan law firm, has previously represented X owner Elon Musk, rockstar Mick Jagger, rapper Jay-Z, and renowned tennis player Naomi Osaka.

He and Karp have demanded in the letter that “as a minimum first step, Kellogg must reinstate — and immediately deliver on — its commitment to remove artificial dyes from its products.”

During a 2015 earnings call with investors, the company made a promise to take out all artificial colors and flavors from its cereals by the end of 2018. However, their American products such as Froot Loops and Baby Shark cereals — targeted at children — still contain them.

Calley Means, a former “Big Food and Big Pharma lobbyist,” told the New York Post that “this letter opens them [Kellogg] up to litigation.”

“They were knowingly negligent,” he said, claiming that the ingredients in the products are “leading to pre-diabetes rates among adults, teens being obese and high schoolers hav[ing] mental health disorders.”

The company has most recently been in the hot seat due to their push for “cereal for dinner” as the food inflation crisis impacts U.S. families.

In one controversial advertisement, mascots Tony the Tiger and Toucan Sam “encourage children to eat cereal with known toxic ingredients for dinner,” Means said.

Calls for boycotting the company began trending on social media after multimillionaire CEO Gary Pilnick boasted in a recent CNBC interview that “the cereal category has always been quite affordable, and it tends to be a great destination when consumers are under pressure.”

“Some of the things that we’re doing is, first, messaging,” Pilnick continued. “We have to reach the consumer where they are. So we’re advertising about cereal for dinner.”

“If you think about the cost of cereal for a family versus what they might otherwise do, that’s going to be much more affordable,” Pilnick added.

The breakfast food company has been advertising the concept of cereal for dinner since the summer of 2022, when inflation reached a 40-year high, Breitbart News reported.

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