In 2019, food giant General Mills debuted a three-point strategy to reduce synthetic pesticide use within its supply chains. The plan was to implement regenerative agriculture practices on 1 million acres of farmland by 2030, increase the use of integrated pest management (IPM) on farms, and expand organic acreage.

More than six years later, the webpage that outlined that plan redirects visitors to a page on regenerative agriculture, where the word “pesticide” does not appear.

“They are no longer aligning their regenerative agriculture program with pesticide reduction at all, which is obviously concerning, because what the soil science points to is that regenerative without significant pesticide reduction is not regenerating soil health,” said Cailin Dendas, the senior coordinator of As You Sow’s Environmental Health Program.

Dendas is the author of a new report that found General Mills is not alone: It’s one of several food companies moving away from earlier promises to reduce pesticide use.

The annual report ranks the country’s biggest food companies on their commitments to disclosing pesticide use and reducing it in their supply chains. This year, report authors awarded lower scores to 10 out of 17 companies, concluding that “the food industry is not stagnating on pesticide risk—it is actively reversing progress it had already made.”

The report lands at a time when evidence on the health and environmental risks of many common pesticides is rapidly mounting, with Americans increasingly concerned about those risks.

In the past month alone, Iowa researchers put out a report concluding that in their state “the impact of pesticide use on cancer incidence may be similar to that of smoking.” Food & Water Watch published a map showing that rates of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma are elevated in Midwest counties where glyphosate use is highest. And a new study from researchers in Peru published in Nature found that the risk of developing cancer in areas where pesticide exposure was more likely was 150 percent higher on average.

Following a Seattle symposium at the end of March to review glyphosate research, leading experts from around the world declared that the evidence is now strong enough to definitively say the use of world’s most ubiquitous weedkiller is causing widespread health harms. In the midst of it all, the Center for Food Safety and Center for Biological Diversity released two analyses showing that even for pesticides that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has determined may cause cancer, the agency almost never includes a warning.

Attributing long-term health harms to pesticide exposure is notoriously complicated, because it’s impossible to isolate exposure to any one chemical from other environmental exposures and risk factors. And the EPA maintains that its processes ensure the pesticides it approves are safe when used as directed.

Nevertheless, Dendas said all of this makes the As You Sow report’s findings on companies moving away from goals to reduce pesticides even more important. “It feels like a time where companies really need to step up, and we’re seeing them turn their backs.”

‘Pesticides in the Pantry’

As You Sow, a nonprofit that uses shareholder and investor advocacy to push companies to adopt responsible environmental and social policies, has been tracking food companies’ pesticide commitments since 2017.

For the annual “Pesticides in the Pantry” report, Dendas explained, her teams spend a few months digging into publicly available documents, such as Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reports. They compile preliminary scores for 17 companies across 27 metrics, including whether the company has stated goals to reduce pesticide use, whether it collects and monitors data from its suppliers, and whether it publicly discloses any of that data on pesticide use. Then, they send what they’ve found to the companies and give them an opportunity to respond before updating and finalizing the scores.

This year, fewer companies than usual—about half—responded, Dendas said.

The best possible score is 27, though most companies are far from that. From 2023 to 2026, the average score fell from 4.5 to just 3. Four companies’ scores improved in that span, but 10 saw their scores fall. And while in 2023 only one company got no points at all, five were awarded zero points this year. (Nestlé scored the highest—with just 10 points, up from 6 in 2023—based on practices including publicly disclosing pesticide data and requiring some farms to reduce pesticide drift.)

General Mills, known for iconic brands including Cheerios, Bisquick, and Annie’s organic, fell the furthest. Having scored 10 points in 2023, the company received zero points this year. In other words, it has no publicly stated goals to reduce pesticide use, no collection of pesticide use data, and no specific policies to protect farmworkers from exposure, among other shortcomings in the report’s rankings.

“They were, for many years, publicly disclosing the pesticide reduction of their supply chain achieved through their organic brands and have since even taken that down,” Dendas said. Similarly, ADM, one of the world’s largest buyers and processors of commodity crops like corn and soybeans, declined by 6 points in the report’s ranking after eliminating a goal it had previously set to “reduce the usage of chemical pesticides in our key agricultural supply chains by 2030.”

Neither company responded to Civil Eats’ requests for interviews related to the As You Sow report.

Experts note that little progress has been made in reducing the volume of risky pesticides used across the U.S. farm landscape, despite the increase in public awareness.

In commodity crops, for example, Bill Freese, science director at the Center for Food Safety, said herbicide use has been increasing, especially because the now long-term, widespread use of herbicides has led many weeds to develop resistance. That means farmers may now have to apply several chemicals to kill all their weeds.