General Mills cheerios are no longer made with genetically modified ingredients according to a post by vice president of global communications Tom Forsyth on the company's website.
"Consumers across the U.S. are seeing "not made with genetically modified ingredients" this week on familiar yellow boxes of original Cheerios," Forsyth said in the post. "Did we change Cheerios? No. Not really. Original Cheerios has always been made with whole grain oats, and there are no GMO oats," Forsyth said in the post to help clarify the situation. "We do use a small amount of corn starch in cooking, and just one gram of sugar per serving for taste," Forsyth said. "And now that corn starch comes only from non-GM corn, and our sugar is only non-GM pure cane sugar. What changed is how we source and handle certain ingredients in our plants," Forsyth said in the post. "Why change anything at all? It's simple. We did it because we think consumers may embrace it.
General Mills has previously sold products that have had GMO's taken out of them.
"...Now we can say the same about the ingredients in original Cheerios," Forsyth said in the post. "But it's not about safety. Biotech seeds, also known as genetically modified seeds, have been approved by global food safety agencies and widely used by farmers in global food crops for almost 20 years," he said in the post.
General Mills process to make Cheerios allowed for the change according to the company's corporate communication Bloomberg Businessweek reported.
"It was the unique and simple nature of original Cheerios that allowed this," Mike Siemienas told Bloomberg Businessweek. "For other cereals, the widespread use of GM seed for corn, soy, and beet sugar make moving to non-GMO ingredients difficult, if not impossible," Siemienas told Bloomberg Businessweek.
Sixty-percent to seventy-percent of food in grocery stores throughout the United States contain genetically modified ingredients according to information on WebMD.com.
