Organic For Everybunny

When Annie’s joined General Mills two years ago, we did so with the goal of bringing more of our great tasting, organic products to more stores and more people across the country, with zero compromise to our company mission.  If you’ve been following our progress, I think you can see we are doing exactly that.

Since the beginning of Annie’s our business growth has brought with it the opportunity to drive greater positive social impact: providing more consumers with better food options, driving toward a more sustainable organic farm economy, and investing in programs and people to drive sustainable agriculture and broader awareness of the importance of real food.  This is what drives our culture, people, and brand.     

We are growing rapidly and succeeding, but there is so much more to do and broad consumer perceptions about organic are a significant challenge.  In our industry, we know and appreciate the accessibility and impact of organic but sometimes we need to get outside of our Berkeley bubble to really understand the challenges we’re up against. According to a recent Annie’s survey:

• Only 23% of people believe they can afford to buy organic foods.
• Only 25% of people believe that organic versions of the foods my family loves are readily available at their grocery store.
• Only 31% of people think buying organic foods positively impact the environment.
• Only 34% of people believe that organic foods taste as good as conventional foods.

I view these findings as both huge challenges and opportunities for Annie’s, General Mills, and our entire industry. We at Annie’s are addressing this on a number of fronts: (1) introducing more great tasting and affordable certified organic options than ever in big and important categories, (2) driving much deeper distribution of certified organic into mainstream stores and schools everywhere, and (3) investing in our supply chain to bring scale that can support a much bigger business as well as more affordable price premiums so we can open an organic door for tens of millions more families.   

On top of these three important things we also need to invest to move the needle on the consumer misconceptions about the availability, affordability, and impact of organic that were underscored in our survey work.  

To get after this challenge, I’m excited to share with you Annie’s first really significant brand campaign in our long history, Organic for Everybunny, which launched on Facebook last week. Those who know me well will appreciate how I truly hate most advertising, but this is very authentic Annie’s, a natural extension of what we have been doing digitally every day here since we launched our first social pages many years ago.  This campaign is fun, cute, and is a tribute to the incredible work everyone who touches this brand has done in an effort to truly democratize organic.

Please take a look at our fun video and be sure to check out our social channels in the coming weeks for more fun bunny content that celebrates our mission of bringing Organic for Everybunny.   

Peace and lots of bunny love from Berkeley,

Best,  JF