The Greenwashing of “Regenerative”
How to differentiate between genuine efforts and co-opted claims
Written by guest contributor Dana Geffner
Over the past 25 years of working in social justice movements, I have witnessed the encroachment of and co-optation by corporations into spaces meant to challenge and transform broken, unjust systems. Often, this leads to the dilution of the original intent and weakens the movements themselves.
We have several examples to showcase how this has happened. For instance, Nike’s marketing campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick spotlighted social justice while the company faced ongoing issues in its supply chains, including reports of poor labor conditions—a glaring contradiction to their public messaging. Starbucks promotes its Coffee And Farmer Equity (C.A.F.E.) practices, claiming they are sourcing coffee ethically. Yet, slave labor has been found on the plantations that they are sourcing from. Both Starbucks and Amazon have used diversity and inclusion language as part of their union-busting tactics.
I’ve seen similar patterns in my work within the fair trade and labor justice movements. In 2012, after years of activists campaigning against Hershey for its use of child slavery in its cocoa supply chains, the company announced it would “certify” all of its cocoa by 2018. While “certify” meant very little and was undefined by the company, the activists involved in the campaign claimed victory immediately. Today, Hershey’s is no closer to ending child slavery in their supply chains, but all the organizing efforts under the Raise the Bar campaign came to a screeching halt as soon as the announcement was made.
B Corp’s certification of Nespresso, owned by Nestlé—a corporation notorious for child labor exploitation and environmental degradation—was another stark example. The USDA’s 2018 decision to certify hydroponics as organic, influenced by prominent brands like Driscoll and Wholesum Harvest, was a blow to the integrity of organic farming and the farmers who prioritize soil health and the health of our planet.
And let’s not forget Fair Trade USA’s blatant disregard for the original intention of fair trade as an organized small-scale farmer movement and their changing of standards to allow big business and big industrial farms to continue the status quo while claiming fair trade practices. This includes their development of a weak certification for Chobani that undermined farmworkers’ collective bargaining efforts, betraying the very people that certification is supposed to support.
The co-optation of movements, certifications, and spaces initially designed to drive transformation seriously threatens meaningful progress and justice. These misleading claims detract from the systemic shifts the movements aimed to achieve, all while creating consumer skepticism. By slowing the transition to genuinely transformative systems, greenwashing allows extractive models to persist—albeit often cloaked in shiny, eco-friendly branding.
Why “Regenerative”?
In recent years, the term “regenerative” has emerged across various sectors, becoming a buzzword in industries ranging from supply chain sustainability and impact investing to green building and holistic health and wellness.
At its core, “regenerative” represents a shift beyond sustainability or resilience: a holistic approach that interconnects a better quality of life with a healthy planet, rejecting massive profits and unfettered growth as the ultimate goals. Instead, it emphasizes restoring ecosystems, building equitable systems, and fostering long-term well-being. While some genuinely embrace regenerative principles—shifting from exploitative to replenishing practices—we should be wary of the term being used purely for marketing purposes.
While advocates work to establish clear definitions in the marketplace and at the policy level, there is currently no official or legal definition of “regenerative.” This lack of clarity leaves consumers to navigate a challenging landscape. How can we discern authentic regenerative efforts from what corporations do best—co-opt ideas without delivering meaningful impact?
To ensure the regenerative movement remains authentic, we must draw on lessons from the past. What criteria can help us distinguish genuine efforts from empty rhetoric? How do we hold organizations accountable and ensure that regenerative practices drive real, systemic change? By learning from history and acting with intention, I hope we can protect this promising movement's integrity and its potential to create a just and sustainable future.
In Part 1 of Just Food Systems, I explored regenerative businesses and advocated for embedding regenerative practices into company bylaws and governance structures. Here, I want to unpack how regenerative agriculture started to gain traction in the mainstream and share insights to help consumers read between the lines and identify the farmers and brands doing the hard, authentic work of creating meaningful change.
The term “regenerative” in agriculture started to gain traction out of the need to find solutions to our climate emergency, becoming an important indicator to differentiate food grown in healthy soil. This became critical when the National Organic Board allowed for non-soil production to be certified as organic under the USDA organic standard, no longer prioritizing soil as a key aspect of organic agriculture.
Animation showing the “5 M’s of Soil Health” as defined by the inspiring farmers of COMSA, one of Equal Exchange’s coffee farming partners.
Research has shown that “regenerative” organic agriculture could be one solution to our climate emergency. Per Rodale Institute’s findings—showcased in their 2014 white paper Regenerative Organic Agriculture and Climate Change - A Down-to-Earth Solution to Global Warming—prioritizing healthy soil in agricultural production through the use of cover crops, compost, crop rotation, and reduced tillage can draw down carbon and sequester it. These techniques were not new to Indigenous communities worldwide but had not been part of the mainstream climate emergency solution dialogue. The idea was to use these agricultural practices to rebuild soil, increase biodiversity, and enhance community well-being. To do any of this, small-scale farmers needed to be prioritized over big industrial farming, meaning they needed to be respected, empowered, and well-funded worldwide. This was what we fair trade activists had been advocating for for decades.
When this research emerged, my organization, Fair World Project, immediately worked to push this message out, continuing to urge retail buyers to prioritize mission-driven brands committed to working in fair trade relationships with small-scale farmers and advocating for policymakers to implement it into their climate policy agendas. We even produced a video called Small-scale Farmers Cool the Planet, highlighting Vandana Shiva and others who were talking about climate change and how fair trade and regenerative organic agricultural techniques can be a solution. We attended the Paris Climate Week of Action in 2015 and handed out DVDs (remember those?) to delegates around the world to help them better understand how regenerative organic agricultural techniques can be a solution, asking them to prioritize it within funding streams. We then organized a workshop at the Natural Product Expo West in Anaheim, where we paid far too much money for a space to educate brands, retailers, and NGOs about the findings. We were excited about the potential of regenerative organic agriculture coupled with fair trade practices. At that time, within the natural product industry, we found it difficult for people to take this idea seriously.
Fast forward a few years later, and we now see “regenerative” hitting the mainstream. The natural product industry has put “regenerative” front and center, with several “regenerative” certifications popping up. This experience showed me that we, as activists, must keep moving forward, even if an idea does not resonate immediately. After all, you might be at the beginning stages of a movement that needs to catch fire.
Creating certifications
In 2016, I was asked to participate in creating a new certification called the Regenerative Organic Certification. My role was to ensure social fairness was a strong attribute of the standards because empowering farmers and farmworkers is key to implementing this type of production method. Fair trade relationships that empower farmers—where farmers make living incomes and long-term relationships are sustained—should be the baseline for scaling regenerative agriculture. By organizing, farmers would have the ability to take advantage of economies of scale, learn from each other, and make enough money to farm regeneratively, which includes paying farmworkers properly.
I’ve been in many conversations about regenerative farming, and most discussions leave out the part about farmers needing to be paid properly. I believed the importance of authentic fair trade relationships had dropped to the wayside, which, again, is why I felt it was important to participate in the development of the Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC). The certification would differentiate brands that partner with farmers’ organizations, build fair trade relationships, and prioritize soil health. While I still believe the ROC is better than others, I, unfortunately, lost many fights during the development of the certification to keep the social fairness pillar strong.
One of the reasons the term “regenerative” finally started to gain traction was in direct response to the USDA organic program deprioritizing soil and selling out to large corporations that wanted hydroponics to be organic certified. Consumers who cared about food produced in soil could no longer rely on USDA organic labels. Farmers who understood the importance of producing their crops in healthy soil realized that the organic label would no longer portray the hard work they were doing to farm regeneratively.
Photo from the Real Organic Project and Adobe House Farm
The Real Organic Project (ROP) emerged with its new certification label, which was an add-on to the USDA organic label for farmers that were farming in soil, their belief being that Regenerative is synonymous with the best of Organic. I discuss the ROP in more depth in Pathways to Creating a Just Food System. It became increasingly clear that farmers who were using these techniques needed a label to tell consumers that they cared about the environment and believed these techniques were a solution to climate change. It would allow consumers to make informed choices when spending money.
While I have been deeply rooted in certification creation and analysis for over two decades, I also understand the profoundly flawed problems with certifications. Still, as corporations continue to go unregulated, exploitation is just a line item in their expense report. People who care about what is happening to people, animals, and the planet need some way to differentiate products. However, it’s extremely important to remember that we can’t rely only on certification labels when over 600 so-called ethical labels exist in the marketplace, mostly with little meaning.
Smaller enterprises and farmers often cannot afford the expense of these certification programs. Some social justice labels make it more difficult for people to organize authentically and change the systemic problems of how farmers and workers are treated because corporations have co-opted the certification schemes.
We should be building on the USDA organic certification as a baseline for regenerative agriculture, as the ROC and ROP certifications both do. The USDA organic seal is widely recognized, and many consumers still trust it as a marker for how food is produced. It can still be used to enforce rules around synthetic pesticide use and genetically modified organisms (GMOs). There have been years of work by advocates, activists, and pioneer farmers to build that certification, so let’s not throw the baby out with bathwater.
Spotting misuse: The greenwashing of “regenerative”
As the term becomes more popular, we have to be aware of its misuse, such as when it refers to surface-level or minimal adjustments, like planting trees or reducing packaging. A corporation might source a single product from a regenerative farm while ignoring the exploitation behind its other products. This can greenwash the entire company’s image, something we are far too familiar with in the fair trade movement.
The idea of regenerative agriculture is focused on tangible outcomes: increased organic matter in the soil, greater biodiversity, and enhanced ecosystem resilience. The challenge is that companies adopt language claiming regenerative without offering metrics to back up their statements. And I’m not saying it’s not a challenge to quantify these outcomes, but a complete lack of transparency is a warning sign. How do we, as consumers, spot the difference?
Companies often cherry-pick practices, such as reducing water use, but ignore others, such as reducing carbon emissions. Some companies even make their own claims and create their own certification labels without any standards or accountability. Further, many companies make “regenerative” claims but don’t address fair wages, working conditions, or equitable distribution of benefits. Some companies promote regenerative agriculture and consistently pay low wages with outrageously large pay ratios between executives and workers. We have to look out for companies that source products from regions with poor labor and environmental standards. Without a commitment to social equity, companies miss the full scope of “regenerative.”
Navigating this landscape isn’t easy. Corporations wield massive marketing budgets designed to confuse and mislead, presenting a polished image that often masks the persistence of extractive practices. However, by equipping ourselves with knowledge and tools, we can learn to differentiate greenwashing from genuine efforts—and take meaningful steps toward supporting those who are driving fundamental transformation.
Distinguishing genuine efforts from empty rhetoric
How can consumers spot a product that was created using authentic regenerative practices? While not foolproof, certifications like Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) or Real Organic Project (ROP) certified can provide assurance. But as I already mentioned, we need to go beyond certifications because they are often expensive, and smaller brands and farms often can’t afford to go through these processes. It will take a combination of research strategies for us to identify brands committed to regenerative practices.
Marlith Pinedo Mozombite, cacao farmer member of Equal Exchange partner ACOPAGRO in Peru, demonstrates using organic fungicide on diseased pods on her family farm.
Research brands’ values and practices. Visit brands’ websites and look for transparency on how products are sourced and their environmental impact. Smaller brands and small-scale farmers like to talk about how they farm, their soil health, biodiversity, and community partnerships. Look for measurable metrics such as carbon sequestration data, water savings, and soil health improvements. I love what the brand SIMPLi is doing: if you buy something on their website, they tell you what is in the crop rotation with that ingredient you are buying. This new, innovative approach showcases their commitment to regenerative agriculture.
Make sure it isn’t tokenism. Look at the brand’s entire portfolio of ingredients and products. Are they talking about a majority of what they are doing or only a token number of ingredients? For example, if you look at Lotus Food and Dr. Bronner’s, websites, you will notice they talk about the regenerative organic agricultural techniques behind all their main ingredients.
Look out for farmer stories. Are farmers’ voices authentically being portrayed? This is a difficult one, as many corporations know how to talk about their farmers, but what is at the forefront of this discussion? Are they sharing how farmers farm and building partnerships with farmers? Equal Exchange talks about their partnerships with small-scale organic farmer organizations, and most, if not all, use traditional regenerative organic agricultural techniques.
Actively work to learn more. Sign up for newsletters of nonprofits that are working on supporting, promoting, and advocating for regenerative organic agriculture. This will connect you deeper to the movement and help you find authentic voices. The Real Organic Project coordinates an annual conference bringing together brands, academics, farmers, activists, and policymakers to talk about the importance of farming regeneratively. Attend their conference in person or virtually.
Partnerships. Is the brand you want to support partnering with reputable organizations to work together on advancing regenerative practices and policies? For example, Dr. Bronner’s and Patagonia partnered with the Rodale Institute, Fair World Project, and other nonprofits to create the Regenerative Organic Certification. Maggie’s Organic and Laude the Label are both small apparel brands committed to working with regenerative organic cotton farmers and also offering eco-shipping through their partnership with the Grow Ahead Foundation, an organization that is funding farmer-led climate resiliency programs that use regenerative organic agriculture techniques.
How is terminology being used? There are lots of generic terms being used in the marketplace, such as “eco-friendly,” “sustainable,” and “corporate social responsibility.” Look for more specific practices such as cover cropping, crop rotation, composting, minimal tillage, and holistic grazing. I recently looked at a $5 billion clothing brand’s website because they were listed in a Forbes article as a brand to support if you wanted to support regenerative agriculture. It was hard for me to believe since I knew their sourcing history. So, I took a few minutes to look at what they were doing on their website. The article stated, “100% of direct-sourced cotton will be sourced responsibly by 2027.” The article went on to say they had five items using regenerative cotton. Is this something to celebrate? A $5 billion company is offering five items using regenerative cotton. That language: “sourced responsibly” is generic. I kept digging. No mention of organic or farmers or workers, and I couldn’t find those five products. And then, looking further, I could see they donated money to an organization that promotes regenerative agriculture, but that was all. It was a token donation for a company that size, but they got to use that in their marketing. Many people will say this is a start—and maybe it is—but we have repeatedly seen how big brands make big promises, do minimal transitions around the edges, and then stop making improvements. I’d rather support the small brands that start off being mission-driven than support the ones that claim they are doing just enough to rebrand their images.
Buy directly from direct-to-consumer models. Many local farms nationwide use regenerative practices without certification because of the cost and time commitment of getting certified. So go to farmers’ markets or sign up for Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs and talk to the farmers about their farming methods to understand more about what is really happening on their farms. LocalHarvest is an online database that helps you find CSA membership near you. This helps us eat healthy and seasonally and helps the farmers maintain a steady income so they can continue to farm regeneratively.
Look for regenerative talking points in your supermarkets. If you can’t find them, ask for help. Many grocery stores now use shelf talkers and signage to signal products made by small-scale producers using regenerative methods. They may not be certified, but you can look for some terminology around regenerative agriculture with smaller brands. While this is not perfect since it is all about marketing, it’s a start. If you don’t see anything, ask for some guidance. Staff at many stores are being educated about regenerative organic agriculture. Don’t forget to share with that staff person how important it is, and write a comment card. The saying goes that for every written comment card, it is believed that 10 others feel the same way. Your voice does matter!
Ultimately, it will be difficult, but we have to start somewhere, and focusing our efforts and support on smaller committed brands over big multinational brands is a safer way to spend our money. I know many advocates don’t follow my line of thinking. Still, let’s learn from past mistakes, stop trying to make big exploitative brands better through market-based initiatives, and start supporting smaller mission-driven brands while working on policies to regulate those other guys’ exploitative business practices. While we build our local economies and put money into smaller businesses, we can start to build a better world that prioritizes the well-being of everyone and everything around us.
