Dairy Queen To Remove Soda From Kids’ Menu By Sept. 1

Taking the lead from other fast food restaurants like McDonalds, Wendy’s and Burger King, Dairy Queen has reportedly decided to nix sugary drinks from the kids’ menu.

While we’re still waiting for confirmation about the menu update from the company, the Center for Science in the Public Interest and other consumer groups are reporting that the Minneapolis-based subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway is joining an ever-growing list of fast-food restaurants no longer serving soda as an option with kids’ meals.

“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,” Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at CSPI said in a statement.

According to Wootan, the decision to remove soda from the kids menu was approved unanimously by DQ’s Franchise Advisory Council.

The removal of all soda (or pop, Coke, cola, fizzy brown stuff) from the DQ kids’ menu is expected to take place by September 1. The company’s current kids’ menu offers milk, soft drinks and the ice drink Arctic Rush as options to complete meals.

The Food Justice campaign from Momsrising.org, a grassroots organization, was quick to applaud DQ’s move, saying the company is now doing its part to keep America’s kids healthy.

“Ensuring that our children can make healthy choices is an important part of raising them,” Monifa Bandele, senior campaign director with the group, says in a statement [PDF]. “When restaurants offer up sugary drinks as a default choice, it undermines those efforts.”

Consumerist’s request for confirmation and comment to Dairy Queen was not immediately returned.

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