Post by @conscious.app

"Ethical" food brands that sold out to big food, and who to support instead. Sellout: LesserEvil, the honest alternative to junk snacks, bought by Hershey in November 2025 for a reported $750 million. Hershey also owns SkinnyPop. Switch to: MadeGood, founder led. Three siblings started it in 2013 when one couldn't find a school-safe snack for his son. Organic bars, cookies and crackers from a nut-free facility. Sellout: Tofurky, four decades family-run so people could opt out of factory farming, sold in 2023 to Morinaga Milk, a Tokyo dairy conglomerate. Vegan purchases now fund dairy. Switch to: The Herbivorous Butcher, founder owned. Aubry and Kale Walch opened America's first vegan butcher shop in Minneapolis in 2016 and still own it. Slices, sausages, roasts and jerky, shipped nationwide. Sellout: Alter Eco, fair-trade chocolate in compostable wrappers, sold in 2023 to Trek One Capital, a Houston oilfield-wastewater firm whose founder faces 71 state counts over unregistered investments. He denies them. Switch to: Askinosie, founder owned. A former criminal defense attorney and his daughter run it in Springfield, Missouri, buying cocoa directly from farmers and sharing the profits. Sellout: Theo, which built America's first organic fair-trade chocolate factory, sold in 2023 to American Licorice. Buying it funds Red Vines and Sour Punch. Switch to: Taza, founder owned. It buys cacao direct, pays above market, and publishes every price it paid, verified by an outside certifier. Founder-run in Somerville, Massachusetts. Sellout: Wallaby, built on certified organic, small-farm dairy, sold in 2024 with Horizon Organic to Platinum Equity, which owned prison phone giant Securus for eight years, criticized for $15 calls to families. Switch to: Nancy's, family owned. The Kesey family has run Springfield Creamery in Oregon since 1960, three generations, never sold. Ethical companies that never sell out are rare, but they do exist. All five here are still run by the founders or the family that started them. Finding them is the hard part. Use the Conscious Spend app to see how ethical companies are, so you can find ones that truly deserve your money.