Animals Force-Fed Feces to Sell Cookies and Crackers: New PETA Campaign Slams Oreo Maker’s Tests

For Immediate Release:
November 18, 2024

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Mondelēz International, which makes popular snacks such as Oreo, Ritz Crackers, and Triscuit, paid experimenters to force-feed mice feces from obese women in support of its “healthy snacking” agenda. PETA is launching a campaign against the company to stop these pointless and cruel tests on animals.

Mondelēz is the first target of PETA’s new initiative, “Eat Without Experiments,” a revolutionary new program and first-of-its-kind website that categorizes food and beverage companies globally based on their animal testing status.

Mondelēz’s “healthy snacking” agenda has also included the following:

• Feeding rats a snack food–based diet—including chips, crackers, and candies with refined or whole wheat rusk—to see whether these fibers could help mitigate the negative effects of this diet and repeatedly taking the animals’ blood  
• Feeding mice a diet high in saturated fat and low in fruits and vegetables to damage their gut health (Experimenters then fed the mice common human foods, such as barley, oranges, peas, and sugar beets, to see whether the fibers could help reverse the damage to their guts before killing and dissecting the animals.)

None of these tests are required by law or relevant to humans, as animals aren’t good models for human health conditions. All the foods tested are common foods with a long history of being consumed by humans.

Mondelēz’s agenda stands in stark contrast to more than 400 companies and brands in PETA’s program—including Tofurky, Monde Nissin, and Unilever—that have been certified as committed to not testing on animals.

Eat Without Experiments—available on PETA’s website—pulls back the curtain on animal experiments, allowing consumers to see which companies torment animals in laboratories to sell their products and which don’t as well as allowing visitors to send e-mails and take action to urge Mondelēz to stop testing on animals.

“For decades, food and beverage companies have tormented and killed dogs, hamsters, monkeys, rabbits, mice, and other animals in pointless experiments that do nothing to advance human health,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “Just as PETA’s groundbreaking cruelty-free cosmetics program effectively wiped out animal testing in the cosmetics industry, the Eat Without Experiments campaign aims to do the same in the food industry.”

Regulatory agencies in the U.S., Canada, and the European Union require studies on humans—not tests on animals—to verify health claims about food products. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s regulations specify that “[animal] studies do not provide information from which scientific conclusions can be drawn regarding a relationship between the substance and disease in humans” because “[t]he physiology of animals is different than that of humans.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.