Opinion
The picture to the left was shared with me by Cami Ryan. Several thoughts and rants come to mind as I look at this marketing campaign.
Has marketing always been this dishonest? Have consumers always been so led astray? Are we all just pawns in the game of food marketing?
I find it quite ironic that the same people that would claim that "big agri-business" is so dishonest with its intentions continue to attempt to mislead the customer in terms of the food that they eat we have food companies that continue to prey on the uninformed public.
Adjacent to this post you can see a picture regarding some locally produced bread. At the surface this is a great concept, a bakery that uses locally produced wheat. And then the marketing train falls off the cliff of honesty.
For those of you that are unaware, there is currently no GMO wheat in Alberta or North America for that matter. This marketing is nothing more than a sly negative marketing campaign looking to trick consumers into thinking that they have something to fear, dread or be scared of.
All wheat in North America is GMO free.
Let me repeat.....
All wheat in North America is GMO free.
You can buy bread from any bakery in North America and it is going to be GMO free. In case you are interested I am not sure where in the world you would buy a loaf of GMO inclusive bread.
Please hold these kind of marketing campaigns accountable and begin to actually have discussions with consumers. Companies like Chipotle and Cobs cannot be successful using such marketing tactics. Your choice is to decide whether you believe in the real story or just another marketing campaign that is dishonest about the product farmers produce. You decide.
Update: Cobs Bakery responds on Facebook (tip of the hat to Sarah Schultz):
Hi everyone, thank you all for your comments. The most important message we intended to convey in this counter card is that 100% of our wheat is sourced from Alberta farms. Regarding the messaging about GMO-free, we are constantly asked by our customers whether or not our wheat is GMO. We had no intention to have a position on GMO-free or not and were proivding an answer a question that customers were asking. Based on your feedback, we will revise the positioning of this message to be more educational, as we intended. Our main purpose was to emphasize that all of our flour is sourced from Alberta farms.
