Cheerios Is Giving Away 100 Million Wildflower Seeds To Save The Bees
Updated Nov. 18 2019, 2:29 p.m. ET
While walking through the cereal aisle at your supermarket (something I stay away from unless I've got a bad case of the munchies), you might've noticed that Buzz the Bee, the lovable mascot for Honey Nut Cheerios, is missing from the cereal box's art.
It turns out that General Mills isn't just trying to save money on printing ink costs, but that Buzz's absence was an intentional move to bring about awareness to important ecological problem: bees are dying at an alarming rate.
Your first thought is probably, "Good riddance, those scumbags go around stinging people anyway. "But there's a problem: honeybees pollinate 70% of humanity's biggest human food crops.
That's right: We owe the existence to the bulk of the food we consume to honeybees pollinating them. Which is why General Mills wants to save the bees.
"We have a bee as our mascot and honey in our product, so we thought somebody should be championing this cause, and we thought that we could be a great champion,” General Mills Canada marketing director Emma Eriksson said in an interview with the CBC last year.
So to help honeybee populations around the world, General Mills is giving away 100 million wildflower seeds to anyone who asks for them.
Each person will get a packet of 500 seeds to plant wherever they want. You can click here to get your own seeds right now. Now the seeds aren't region specific, so it's probably a good idea to make sure the seeds grow naturally in your area to ensure they'll thrive and play nice with the animals already chilling in your ecosystem.
The company even pledged to plant wildflowers in its 3300 acres of oat farms by the year 2020.
It's nice to see big companies give back to the planet. And at the end of the day, in my opinion, it's ultimately good for business. Can't really make money on a planet long-term if you're not helping to preserve it, right?