Starbucks Has a New Shareholder: PETA

As a Stockholder, Group Plans to Press Chain to Stop Charging Extra for Vegan Milk

For Immediate Release:
December 16, 2019

Contact:
Brooke Rossi 202-483-7382

As part of its campaign to get Starbucks to stop charging up to 80 cents extra for vegan milk, PETA has purchased the minimum number of shares in the company required to submit shareholder resolutions and to attend and speak at Starbucks’s annual meetings.

“Many coffee drinkers are lactose intolerant, and PETA is intolerant of cruelty to cows, which is why charging extra for soy and nut milks is hard to swallow,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA is heading to Starbucks’ boardroom to urge the company to end this unfair surcharge.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—notes that the surcharge punishes those who are lactose intolerant as well as anyone who simply wants to reduce methane-gas emissions or opposes cruelty to cows. In today’s dairy industry, cows are artificially inseminated (raped via an inserted syringe) and calves are torn away from their loving mothers within a day of birth. Mother cows have been known to wail for their calves for days after separation. Male calves are often slaughtered for veal, and females are eventually sentenced to the same miserable fate as their mothers and then killed when they stop producing enough milk to be profitable.

PETA opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.