Cheerios slammed on Facebook over genetic modification

With prompting from safe-food campaign GMOInside, thousands of users flooded Cheerios’ app with words that do anything but prompt fond memories of the brand. General Mills, Cheerios’ parent company, has taken the app down, but a few sites have archived the messages, which include “poison” and “not safe.” The pictures featured on Cheerios’ Facebook page show what the brand was going for with the app: terms such as “heart” and “homework distraction.”

What prompted the massive influx of criticism was a $1.1 million contribution from General Mills to a campaign against California’s Proposition 37, which would have required labeling of foods that use genetically modified ingredients. GMOInside has also singled out certain ingredients in Cheerios that “are likely to be derived from GMOs [genetically modified organisms].”

Cheerios’ response