This website analyzes the correlations between four different food companies: Monsanto, Syngenta, General Mills, and Whole Foods. Monsanto and Syngenta are companies know for creating genetically-modified foods, while General Mills and Whole Foods are well known for selling organic foods.

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Stock Analysis

The candlestick plots below show the stocks of Monsanto (MON), Syngenta (SYT), General Mills (GIS), and Whole Foods (WFM) over the last three months.

The correlation plot shows the correlation between the four companies’ stocks. According to the stock data from the last three months. The stock prices of Monsanto are more closely correlated with those of Syngenta than the other two organic food companies. Interestingly, the stock prices of Whole Foods has a stronger correlation with Syngenta than General Mills.

The tree plot below shows that Syngenta is the best predictor of stock price for Monsanto. This supports the conclusions drawn from the correlation plot. Intuitively, this relationship is not suprising given that the other two companies are major manufactureres of organic food while Monsanto and Syngenta major producers of genetically modified foods.

Tweet Distribution Around the World

In terms of distribution around the entire world, Monsanto and General Mills have tweets that originate from all across the globe. Whole Foods is mostly mentioned in the US, while Syngenta has a base in the US and in Europe.

Word Associations

The Monsanto word cloud shows that people are still worried about the health impacts of genetically modified foods. Although the word cloud shows many words with positive associations, in the context of tweets, words like “pollinators”, “america”, and “protect” are associated with issues that people believe stem from production of genetically modified foods. Thus, from the tweets analyzed, it seems that Monsanto is not popular with the community on Twitter.

Syngenta also seems to be unpopular with the Twitter community. The words “joint opposition” and “against” are the most prevalent in the word cloud, and this seems to stem from the Twitter community’s protest against the patenting of seeds by Syngenta.

In contrast with Monsanto and Syngenta, General Mills seems to be celebrating its 150th birthday. Also, very few negative words were associated with General Mills. Most words in the “negative” area of the word cloud are associated with cooking or baking.

Whole Foods seems to have issues of its own. The main words in the word cloud are “bigotry” and “distrespectful”. This may come from the “collard greens” issue. Whole Foods recently tweeted that people should be cooking with collard greens, but the African-American Twitter community did not take kindly to it. Collard greens are a part of African-American tradition, and Whole Food’s “discovery” of the greens angered the community. However, other than that specific issue, tweets about Whole Foods seem to be more about recipes more than anything else.