Victory! After a push from PETA, five prominent food and beverage companies—PepsiCo. Inc., The Coca-Cola Company, Campbell Soup Company, Fresh Innovations, and Sensient Technologies—are closing their checkbooks and refusing to fund cruel and deadly experiments on animals.

The move comes after PETA contacted company leadership, informing them that their money was being used to kill animals in pointless experiments conducted at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Food Research Institute. The institute’s experimenters repeatedly force-fed parasite-infested feces to animals before slicing their bodies open, among other horrors.

After considering PETA’s information, The Coca-Cola Company cut off all sponsorship of the Food Research Institute, while the other four companies placed restrictions on their donations, prohibiting another cent of their money from funding tests on animals there.

Money for Nothing

Previously, the Food Research Institute didn’t allow companies to choose how their money was spent. We successfully pushed it to change that policy. Now, corporate sponsors can opt out of funding cruelty, ensuring the institute has less cash to waste on pointless experiments and preventing countless animals from suffering in ridiculously unscientific experiments that are irrelevant to human health.

Experimenters funded by the institute have conducted numerous curiosity-driven experiments on animals despite the widespread availability of superior, non-animal research methods. In one test, experimenters force-fed pregnant monkeys whipping cream contaminated with listeria bacteria, killing some of their fetuses. They then cut the mothers open, took their dead babies, and dissected the corpses.

In another test, experimenters repeatedly force-fed bacteria to mice, suffocated them to death, and dissected them. Experimenters also injected mice with botulinum bacteria and waited for them to die from the toxin.

What You Can Do

PETA is now urging General Mills and Kraft Heinz to get in line and join these compassionate companies by mandating that the money that they contribute to the Food Research Institute be restricted to only non-animal research.

Please help us keep animals out of laboratories by taking action to urge Taiwan food and beverage companies to stop killing animals in product experiments:

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