Starbucks to drop rBGH milk products

Starbucks to drop rBGH milk products

	Published : Thu, 18 Jan 2007 07:24 By : Agencies Print this Story

SEATTLE (AFX) - Starbucks Corp. has dropped dairy products containing an artificial growth hormone at coffeehouses in the West and New England, and is investigating a similar change at stores nationwide.

The announcement comes less than a month after the world's largest specialty coffee retailer said it was halfway through a plan to phase out artery-clogging trans fats at company-owned U.S. stores.

As of this month, 37 percent of milk, half-and-half, whipped cream and other liquid dairy products that Starbucks purchases are free of bovine growth hormone, also known as rBGH, spokesman Brandon Borrman said. That's an increase of about 27 percent from the 2006 fiscal year, he said.

The change affects stand-alone Starbucks stores in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Alaska, Montana and New Mexico, along with Northern California and New England, Borrman said. Starbucks has 5,668 stores in the United States.

The Seattle company also is examining plans to phase such products out of all stores nationwide, but hasn't yet committed to making the larger change, Borrman said.

'We have been looking at it for quite a while,' he said Wednesday. 'I think it's fair to say there's some momentum in this direction. But we have not finished our assessment of this change yet.'

Borrman would not say how the switch has affected Starbucks' costs, but he said the company hasn't raised its drink prices as a result.

For more than a decade, some advocacy groups have asserted there has not been enough research on the effects in humans of milk products from cows that were given the hormone, which is administered to dairy cattle during the middle phase of lactation to boost milk production.

'We think it's good news, and we are happy to hear it,' Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food and Water Watch in Washington, D.C., told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for Wednesday's editions.

Large-scale dairy operators say there is no scientific evidence to suggest any effect on humans from the hormone, which is marketed as Posilac by Monsanto Co. of St. Louis. The Food and Drug Administration approved the hormone for commercial sales beginning in early 1994.

'Growth hormones only work on their own kind. A lot of people don't understand that,' Blair Thompson, a spokesman for the Washington Dairy Products Commission, told the P-I.

Starbucks' costs likely will increase because the hormone is now so widely used, Thompson said.

'Unless they are willing to absorb a higher cost and take a smaller profit, they will have to pass it on to the consumer,' Thompson said. 'They will have to pay more to get the product.'