Dear Friends,
Today I would like to ask you to spend 5 minutes to help my family by contacting Horizon Organic milk company.
My parents recently became a certified organic dairy here in Idaho; they milk 50 cows on a small family farm, Halverson Dairy in Rupert, Idaho. It was a 2 year process costing several thousands of dollars to obtain the certification. During that time, Horizon Organic offered seminars encouraging dairies to become organic and talked to my dad about buying his milk once he was certified. They also promote a “Four Steps to Organic” program on their website which my parents followed faithfully. Now that the process is complete and my parents are ready to start selling their milk, Horizon is saying they won't honor their verbal commitment to buy the milk.
Horizon promotes themselves as a company made up of small family dairies, but most of their milk comes from factory dairies with thousands of cows. In fact, Horizon opened another dairy with several thousand cows in Idaho shortly after they told my parents they had too much milk to take the milk from their 50 cows.
I would like you to call Craig Fullmer of Horizon Dairy/WhiteWave Foods (the parent company of Horizon Dairy) and tell him that you would like Horizon to honor their commitment to organic family dairies and that you will not be buying Horizon Organic milk until his company stops misleading consumers and dairy producers. (Their milk is sold at Winco and their website is http://www.horizonorganic.com/) His number is 1-800-488-9283, select the option for employee directory and key in his last name. You will probably get his voicemail, just leave the message above with your name and contact number.
You can also contact Scott Toth, VP of WhiteWave Foods, and tell him the same thing. His number is 214-303-3400, you will get his secretary. Both of these men are aware of my parents' situation and were part of the decision to not take their milk, even though my parents had been working with Horizon for 2 years during the certification process.
Thank you very much for taking a few minutes to make these calls. If you have any questions, just add a comment or email me. And feel free to forward this to anyone else you think might be willing to help us.
I hope Horizon will realize that integrity is important and people are willing to take a stand for what's right.
3 comments:
That is sad Janet, I hope they will honor their promise to your parents.
Janet, has the situation been resolved yet? If not, we'd be happy to add our voices (and non-spending dollars) to the cause!
This has not been resolved and it looks like my parents are going to lose the dairy, and possibly the farm as a result. They invested so much into becoming organic and now have no way to recoup the cost. We are trying to still get the word out, there is a website http://sites.google.com/site/integrityinbusiness/ that we are using to try to get word out to newspapers and we are trying to work with some of the big organic groups like Organic Consumers Association and Cornacopia.
They have told us that there are other small farmers who had written contracts with Horizon that are being dumped by the company.
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