Victory! Japan’s Largest Candymaker Ends Experiments on Animals
For the latest on whether this company funds or conducts tests on animals, please check PETA’s “Eat Without Experiments” program.
Victory! After discussions with PETA, Morinaga & Co.—Japan’s largest confectioner and maker of HI-CHEW candy, which is sold in the U.S.—has ended all experiments on animals used to make health claims for marketing products and ingredients.
The company had previously conducted cruel and archaic tests in order to make dubious health claims about its food products, including passion fruit seed extract, aloe vera, and grape extract. During experiments published by the company starting in 2016, nearly 100 mice and rats were force-fed, starved, irradiated, and injected with chemicals. The animals were then killed (by having their necks broken) and dissected.
PETA wrote to the candymaker to point out that these tests weren’t required by law, the results couldn’t be applied to humans, and the ingredients being tested had no toxicity concerns. In effect, there was no reason the tests couldn’t be conducted using human subjects or other high-tech, non-animal testing methods.
We urged Morinaga to follow in the footsteps of other major food and beverage companies (such as Asahi Group Holdings, Barilla, Campbell Soup Company, The Coca-Cola Company, Ensuiko Sugar Refining Co., Ezaki Glico, Fuji Oil Holdings, General Mills, House Foods, ITO EN, James White Drinks, Kewpie Corporation, Kikkoman, Lindt & Sprüngli, Lipton, McCain Foods, Megmilk Snow Brand, Meiji Holdings, Molson Coors Brewing Company, NH Foods, Nissin Foods Holdings Co., Ocean Spray, PepsiCo, POM Wonderful, Riken Vitamin, Sapporo Holdings, Satake Corporation, Suntory Holdings, T. Hasegawa Co., Toyo Suisan Kaisha, Ltd., Welch’s, and Yakult Honsha) that prohibited barbaric tests on animals after discussions with PETA—and it worked!
We are leading the global effort to end experiments on animals.
After discussions with PETA, the following food and beverage companies have also established progressive new policies banning animal testing for making health claims for marketing—which they did not previously conduct or fund—and several have agreed to post the new policies on their websites:
- B&G Foods
- Bacardi & Company
- Chobani
- Cott Corporation
- Dean Foods
- Del Monte Pacific
- E. & J. Gallo Winery
- Heineken N.V.
- Lancaster Colony Corporation
- Monogram Foods
- OSI Group
- Pinnacle Foods
- Weston Foods
What You Can Do
Animal experimentation is fake science and has no place in institutions of higher learning. Join PETA in demanding that the University of Delaware put an end to experimenter Tania Roth’s twisted “child abuse” experiments on rats, and call on the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to stop funding them.
