Food Babe’s Starbucks Attacks Draw ‘Quackmail’ Backlash: Retail

Food Babe breezes into a public radio station in Charlotte, North Carolina, clutching a $10 jar of raw juice and dressed from her morning workout -- Lululemon tank, sequined black Uggs and a charm necklace blessed in India.

Food Babe is the nom de blog for Vani Hari, a 35-year-old banking consultant turned food activist, who has built a loyal online audience by calling out companies from Starbucks Corp. to Chick-fil-A Inc. for ingredients she deems harmful. Hari has tapped into Americans’ growing disquiet about processed food with a simple overarching question: What if all the small amounts of artificial and synthetic ingredients we ingest add up to something that harms us? If it’s true that the dose makes the poison, “we don’t know the dose,” she says.