What to Do When Your Favorite “Better” Brand Gets Called Out Online

For the ethical consumer, who strives to choose food products that are environmentally friendly, healthy and free of labor problems or toxic packaging, focusing on companies with good reputations and trusted labels has been an easy shortcut. This one is the good chocolate company. This one does eggs the right way. But what about when those long-trusted brands pop up in the news or on social media for being “less than” what you hoped?

In the past few weeks the popular food companies Vital Farms and Kerrygold butter have been raked over the social media coals, the targets of internet food sleuths with varying degrees of expertise. Our current cultural moment has bred a type of social media inquisition led by regular people and wellness influencers who are using the true crime podcast playbook to become digital detectives. As we all know, some true crime fanatics have actually solved long unresolved murder cases. But many of them merely fan the flames of speculation to turn the ordinary into the suspicious.

For Vital Farms, there were revelations that their eggs might not be as pasture-raised as their marketing suggested; for Kerrygold butter, it was the discovery that the butter might not be made from the milkfat of exclusively grassfed cows, which is what people had reasonably assumed from the packaging.