One year ago this month, I travelled to Oak Brook, Illinois to attend the annual McDonald’s shareholder meeting along with five other moms: Sally Kuzemchak of Real Mom Nutrition; Casey Hinds of KY Healthy Kids; Leah Segedie, founder of the Mamavation community; Migdalia Rivera, associate campaign director at MomsRising.org; and Rosa Perea, a Chicago-area health educator. We were all there as guests of Corporate Accountability International (CAI) as part of its #MomsNotLovinIt campaign, which protests McDonald’s aggressive marketing to children, including its in-school marketing programs.
As I recounted in a post called “Speaking Truth to Ronald,” McDonald’s did everything it could that day to silence our message, including changing its longstanding question-and-answer protocol at the end of the meeting and requiring the six of us, out of hundreds of other meeting attendees, to wear badges with a bright red sticker on them. (Subtle, no?)
Now, on the one-year anniversary of our trip to Oak Brook and on the two-year anniversary of the CAI campaign, there’s good news to celebrate as well as challenges yet to be addressed. Here are three new posts that look back and look ahead:
- Casey Hinds: “Recap: Two Years of #MomsNotLovinIt;”
- Sally Kuzemchak: “Why I’m Still Not Lovin’ McDonald’s;” and
- Mamavation, “Why Brands Should Listen to Mothers: #MomsNotLovinIt.”
And if you’d like to add your own voice to the conversation, you can send this letter to McDonald’s new CEO, Steve Easterbrook, asking the company to cease in-school marketing and to retire Ronald once and for all.
Do You Love The Lunch Tray? ♥♥♥ Then “like” The Lunch Tray! Join almost 10,000 TLT fans by liking TLT’s Facebook page, join 5,600 TLT followers on Twitter, or get your “Lunch” delivered right to your email inbox by subscribing to my posts. You can download my FREE 40-page guide to “Getting Junk Food Out of Your Child’s Classroom” and be sure to check out my free rhyming video for kids about processed food, “Mr. Zee’s Apple Factory!“
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2015 Bettina Elias Siegel
Sarah says
McDonalds is so popular among kids these days, despite aggressive protests from different sectors of the community. Well done for standing on what you believe in.