PETA to Rail at Kraft Heinz Execs for Company’s Role in Broken Food System

For Immediate Release:
May 4, 2022

Contact:
Brooke Rossi 202-483-7382

“When will Kraft Heinz commit to producing only vegan foods?” That’s the question a representative of PETA, which bought stock in Kraft Heinz early in the pandemic, will ask executives at the virtual annual meeting tomorrow of Oscar Mayer’s parent company, noting that going vegan would help the company achieve its commitment to carbon neutrality while sparing animals’ lives and safeguarding against future pandemics, which stem overwhelmingly from human interactions with animals.

“The more consumers learn about how animals endure prolonged pain and agonizing deaths in slaughterhouses, the more eager they are to choose delicious, eco-friendly, and pandemic-proof vegan options,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA is calling on Kraft Heinz to ditch meat and focus on the future: flavorful vegan products, which it’s already invested heavily in.”

In the meat industry, workers chop off pigs’ tails, clip their teeth with pliers, and castrate the males—all without pain relief—and cram chickens and turkeys into filthy sheds and breed them to grow such unnaturally large upper bodies that their legs become crippled under the weight. In slaughterhouses, workers hang animals upside down and slit their throats. Bird flu, swine flu, and COVID-19 all stemmed from confining and killing animals for food, and animal agriculture is responsible for nearly one-fifth of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions.

Recently, Kraft Heinz formed a joint venture with food tech startup TheNotCompany to create new vegan Not Hot Dogs. The partnership comes after PETA advised Oscar Mayer to produce humane and environmentally friendly vegan meats last year.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.