Problems Under the Lid
One of the earliest examples of public outrage of a pinkwashing campaign was for a promotion Yoplait ran for years. Yoplait had two problems- not only were they not donating that much money to breast cancer charities, the yogurts they were selling as a part of the promotion had questionable ingredients.
But underneath the lid, there were more problems for Yoplait. The cows that Yoplait gets the milk they use to make their yogurt have been injected with a synthetic hormone called recombinant bovine growth hormone (also known as rBGH). rBGH has been linked to a handful of health problems, breast cancer being one of them.
Human consumption of rBGH leads to hormone changes which in turn can lead to breast cancer. The link between rBGH and breast cancer isn’t definite, but it is solid enough to be a cause for concern. More so, Yoplait doesn't need to be using rBGH. Other companies that make dairy products, such as Walmart and Starbucks. don’t use rBGH in their dairy products. Yoplait doesn't need to be using rBGH at all, but at the very least, they should avoid using it in the products that are a part of a breast cancer awareness campaign.
Yoplait’s “Save Lids to Save Lives” initiative launched in 1999, but it wasn’t until 2008 that it ran into trouble. The promise was that the company would donate 50 cents to breast cancer research for every yogurt lid mailed in. In 1999 alone, customers mailed in 9.4 million lids, which would have resulted in a $4.7 million donation given to breast cancer research- a pretty sizeable donation by any standard. But what General
Mills failed to disclose about the campaign is that the donation would be capped at $100,000 meaning that the most the company would donate was $100,000, regardless of how many lids customers ended up sending in. The donation that was actually made was roughly just over 2% of how much money was actually “raised” by customers. After public outcry, most notably a campaign launched by Breast Cancer Action against Yoplait, the company was forced to change its ways. As can be seen in the image below, more recent campaigns now disclose that they are capped at a certain amount.