Monsanto: The Company that Owns the World’s Food Supply

Genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, have been the subject of controversy pretty much

since their inception.

More recently they’ve become sort of a buzzword for outraged social media experts, but don’t

let these Twitter crusaders fool you, GMOs are in fact a very serious topic.

They have an impact on everyone.

Take the US, for example, where the most produced crop by far is corn.

In 2014 over 361 million tons of corn were cultivated, more than all other crops combined.

That corn is then used to make a variety of different products.

Not just food: you’ll find corn derivatives in Coke, milk,

toothpaste, aspirin and varnish.

Corn is also the most popular animal feed, and when you consider the fact that 85% of

all US corn is genetically modified, you’ll realize GMOs are all around you.

That’s why this week on Behind the Business we’ll be taking a look at the company that

started it all: the world’s largest seed company, Monsanto.

Monsanto was originally founded as a chemical company in 1901 by John Francis Queeny.

Queeny was in his forties by that point and he had had a pretty rough start to his life.

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 left his family homeless when he was only 12.

He had to quit his education in order to start working full-time as an office boy at a wholesale

drug firm.

Through hard work and dedication John climbed the ranks of the pharmaceutical industry,

and he eventually moved to St. Louis in 1891 as a representative of the Meyer Brothers

Drug Company, the largest drug distributor at the time.

Fiver years later John married Olga Monsanto and when he decided to establish a business

of his own in 1901, he named his company after her.

John established Monsanto in order to produce saccharin, an artificial sweetener that is

300 times sweeter than table sugar and has effectively no nutritional value.

Saccharin was first synthesized in 1879 and although it is a widely popular sugar substitute

today, back in the 1900s nobody in the US had even heard of it.

Germany had a near-monopoly on its production, and there wasn’t a single manufacturer in

the United States.

John’s newly established business was the first US saccharin producer and the American

market turned out to be very lucrative.

One of his earliest customers was actually the Coca Cola company, which still uses saccharin

in its popular Diet Cokes.

By 1905 John had added two more food additives to Monsanto’s repertoire: vanillin and coumarin,

which up until then were also produced only by Germany.

In its first decade Monsanto barely turned a profit because the Germans were constantly

undercutting them.

When the United States declared war on Germany in 1917 though, all chemical imports were