Dairy Queen joins Burger King, Wendy’s, McDonalds,
Subway, Chipotle, Arby’s and Panera in
Providing Healthier Default Options on their Kids Menus
After years of pressuring fast food giants to stop marketing sugary sodas to children – Dairy Queen has announced that it will be removing all soda pop products from their kids menus, by September 1, 2015. MomsRising.org members, joined by advocates at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, urged the chain to improve the nutritional quality of its kids’ meals by removing soda from the kids menu. The voices of moms and parents were heard!
With Dairy Queen agreeing to remove fountain drinks like soda from its children’s menu, they now join Burger King, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s as well as Subway, Chipotle, Arby’s, and Panera in providing healthier beverage options in their kids meals.
Monifa Bandele, Senior Campaign Director of MomsRising.org’s Food Justice campaign, issued the following statement on Dairy Queen’s announcement:
“Parents and families across the country are applauding as one by one, restaurants are listening to parents and public health experts and starting to do their part to help keep America’s kids healthy, but we aren’t done yet! While Dairy Queen is now offering better default beverages, we need more restaurants to do the same because sugar-sweetened beverages uniquely promote heart disease and type 2 diabetes. ‘
“Ensuring that our children can make healthy choices is an important part of raising them. When restaurants offer up sugary drinks as a default choice, it undermines those efforts.
“Hundreds of thousands of MomsRising.org members and volunteers have spoken up asking fast food industry leaders to take this step. While Dairy Queen’s action to remove soda is a great first step – we urge all fast-food restaurants to further improve upon their healthy options for children and adults by serving whole grain rolls, offering more fruit and vegetable options, reducing sodium across the menu, and adopting a comprehensive policy to limit the marketing of unhealthy food to children.
Margo G. Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest added:
“Dairy Queen deserves credit for being responsive to the concerns of parents, who increasingly want to be able to order off the kids’ menu without having to say ‘no’ to soda. That DQ’s Franchise Advisory Council voted unanimously to adopt this policy shows the depth of the company’s commitment.”
MomsRising.org is an online and on-the-ground grassroots organization of more than a million people who are working to achieve economic security for all families in the United States. MomsRising is working for paid family leave, flexible work options, affordable childcare, and for an end to the wage and hiring discrimination which penalizes so many others. MomsRising also advocates for better childhood nutrition, health care for all, toxic-free environments, and breastfeeding rights so that all children can have a healthy start. Established in 2006, MomsRising and its members are organizing and speaking out to improve public policy and to change the national dialogue on issues that are critically important to America’s families. In 2013, Forbes.com named MomsRising’s web site as one of the Top 100 Websites For Women for the fourth year in a row and Working Mother magazine included MomsRising on its “Best of the Net”list. MomsRising also maintains a Spanish language website: MamásConPoder.
