General Mills
Consumer Staples
46
out of 100. Number 251 of 512, counting from the worst.
Where General Mills does well
- Arbitration 0 of 20. Nothing found.
- Renewals 0 of 20. Nothing found.
- No forced arbitration and no class-action waiver anywhere in the current terms — General Mills famously scrapped its 2014 arbitration clause within days of a New York Times exposé ('reverted back to our prior legal terms, which contain no mention of arbitration') and has never reinstated it, unlike most of its peers.
- No auto-renewal traps or subscription cancellation schemes — it sells food, not memberships.
- The policy expressly states 'we will not sell any lists of consumer contact information to unaffiliated companies for their marketing purposes' and promises no email marketing without express consent, with unsubscribe always available.
- It honors the Global Privacy Control opt-out signal for cookies, provides a privacy-rights portal with an appeal process, and says it will not discriminate against users who exercise privacy rights.
General Mills can rewrite the rules whenever it wants and never has to tell you.
The fine print
6 clauses and findings from the draft archive, dated 1 October 2026. The plain English comes first; the small print is the company's own words. None of these has been checked yet.
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General Mills can rewrite the rules whenever it wants and never has to tell you. You're on the hook for changes you never saw — your only defense is checking the legal page yourself.
We reserve the right to change these terms and conditions at any time without notice. Please check back often to ensure you are aware of any updates or changes to these terms.
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Privacy rules can change unilaterally, and the new version automatically governs data already collected from you. A policy that later allowed new data uses would reach back over everything General Mills already has on you.
We may change or replace this Privacy Policy at our sole discretion at any time. Please check back from time to time to ensure that you are aware of any updates or changes in this Privacy Policy. Unless stated otherwise, our current Privacy Policy applies to all information collected by or through any Site that displays an authorized link to this Privacy Policy.
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Any idea you submit — a recipe, a product suggestion, a drawing — becomes General Mills' property outright, 'throughout the Universe,' and they can commercialize it without paying you a cent.
All comments, suggestions, ideas, notes, drawings, concepts, recipes or other information disclosed or submitted to us by you through this Website or in response to solicitations in this Website ('Submitted Ideas') shall be and shall remain our property. ... Without limitation, we shall exclusively own all now known or hereafter existing rights to the Submitted Ideas of every kind and nature throughout the Universe and shall be entitled to unrestricted use of the Submitted Ideas for any purpose whatsoever, commercial or otherwise without compensation to the provider of the Submitted Ideas.
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General Mills flat-out admits its cookie and ad-tech practices can count as 'selling' or 'sharing' your data under state privacy laws. Meanwhile it collects income level, marital status, number and ages of your children, purchasing behavior, and publicly observable activities (blogs, posts) — and can mash all of it together 'for any of the purposes described in this Privacy Policy,' i.e., targeting you with ads.
Some of these activities could involve third parties and may be considered 'sales,' 'sharing,' 'targeted advertising,' or a similarly defined activity under local privacy laws. ... Please note that parts or all of the information we collect or obtain may be combined or linked (by us or by third parties providing services to us) for any of the purposes described in this Privacy Policy.
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Post a photo, recipe, or review on a General Mills site and they get a permanent, sublicensable right to use it in marketing. You can't take it back.
By submitting any content to this site, you understand and agree that you are giving us a royalty-free, irrevocable, non-exclusive and sublicenseable license to use, reproduce, publish, distribute, perform, display and creative derivative works from any such user submissions, in whole or in part, in any form (including for promotional or marketing purposes).
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If anything goes wrong — including a data breach — your maximum recovery is $100, and the terms say your only real remedy is to quit the site.
If you become dissatisfied in any way with this Website or its Terms of Use or Privacy Policy, your sole and exclusive remedy is to stop using this Website and its services. ... then the aggregate liability of General Mills and its affiliates shall not exceed one hundred dollars ($100).
How these were found
Documents read October 1, 2026 via browser_open on the official domain (no mirror needed — generalmills.com served both pages to the fetcher). Privacy Policy effective date: July 3, 2025 (stated on page). Terms of Use carries no version/effective date, only a link to the privacy policy. Arbitration-history fact (2014 NYT story and same-week reversal, 'reverted back to our prior legal terms, which contain no mention of arbitration') comes from third-party press coverage (AP via manufacturing.net; Public Citizen), while the current absence of any arbitration clause was verified directly in the live Terms of Use. Box Tops for Education's standalone App Terms/Program Rules on BTFE.com were not separately reviewed; per the main Privacy Policy, programs with their own linked policy are governed by that policy instead. No data-retention schedule is disclosed in the Privacy Policy, so the retention score rests on vague retention language plus the absence of stated deletion timelines.
These notes come from the original draft and are not independent verification.