The List of 2023’s Most ‘Woke’ Companies Might Surprise Shoppers

The list of 2023’s most-woke companies that conservative shoppers might want to avoid if they wish to align their purchases with their values will probably surprise some people.

At the top of the list is Unilever, best known as the maker of Dove, Vaseline and other skin-care products, but also as the owner of ice-cream brand, Ben & Jerry’s, long known for embracing progressive causes.

But not making the Top 10 list at all are some of the brands that dominated news cycles in 2023 for their perceived wokeness, like Disney, Bud Light and Target.

The list comes courtesy of Veebs, which launched an app this year that helps consumers make purchasing decisions based on whether or not their social and political values are aligned with those promoted by a brand’s parent company.

While conservatives have dubbed the Veebs product the “anti-woke app,” it’s actually nonpartisan, in that liberals also use it to identify brands that lean too far right to warrant their support.

The term “woke” was thrown around a lot in 2023 to describe, for example, Bud Light’s hiring of a transgender influencer to market its beer or a display at Target stores featuring Pride merchandise for children that included “tuck-friendly” swimwear for hiding male genitalia.

Newsweek asked Veebs to construct a Top 10 list of the most-woke companies using its proprietary method that uses public documents, employee statements, news reports, advertising campaigns and computations driven in part by artificial intelligence to determine a brand’s “V” score.

To determine the Top 10 Woke Brands of 2023 in the shopping category (products typically available at a Walmart) Veebs set its database to score brands across seven “Values” settings: Conservative, Liberal, Social Justice, LGBTQIA+, Climate Emergency, America First, and Support Veterans, explained Veebs CEO Chris Rhodes.

Just like Veebs users set up their own “Value Packs” to weed out the undesirable brands they don’t want to spend their money on, Veebs did likewise to identify the most progressive companies conservatives might deem overly woke. After crunching the numbers, The Top 10 list looked like this:

1. Unilever
2. e.l.f. Cosmetics (beauty supplies)
3. Mars (M&M candy, Pedigree dog food)
4. Pernod Ricard (Seagram’s gin, Jameson whiskey)
5. Campbell’s (soup, Goldfish snacks, Prego pasta sauce)
6. PepsiCo (soft drinks, Gatorade, Quaker Oats)
7. The Hershey Co. (chocolate, SkinnyPop snacks)
8. Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams
9. Mattel (Fisher-Price games, DC Comics-licensed toys)
10. McCormick (Lawry’s spices, French’s mustard)

There’s no single, headline-grabbing event that landed any of the Top 10 companies on the list, they are simply the companies that “more consistently over the course of 2023 connected the dots for liberals,” thus they might embrace them while anti-woke consumers might shun them, explained Rhodes.

Newsweek reached out to all 10 of the companies to ask about their inclusion on the list, but none chose to comment.

Rhodes said he and his staff weren’t surprised by the results of their exercise to identify the most woke companies—”we’re up to our eyeballs in this data,” he said—but consumers probably will be.

“All consumers have seen is Bud Light and Target all year, but what goes viral in any given moment isn’t an accurate reflection of what a company does on an ongoing basis,” he said. “What’s in the news can be different than what shows up in our deep data sets.”

“Woke” is defined as being alert to social inequities and it is closely aligned with “cancel culture,” diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and environmental, social and governance (ESG). Critics say wokeness promotes identity politics, that it’s akin to political correctness on steroids and leads to censorship.

For now, Veebs is focused on products purchased in stores, which might explain why Disney isn’t on the Top 10 list even after a high-profile woke battle with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Veebs, though, is launching a travel and leisure category in 2024 that might reveal more accurately where Disney stands.

Rhodes said Bud Light parent Anheuser-Busch InBev didn’t make the list because “it’s a historically conservative brand that is in the midst of a real-time transition towards the center and left-center.”

He added that Molson Coors, a Bud Light competitor, has a higher liberal score “and is far more foundationally progressive,” though consumers haven’t yet noticed.

As for Target, Rhodes said, the Veeb’s algorithm is “detecting more persistence of the V Score changes, and it is trending towards a long-term decrease of the parent’s Conservative score, and increase of the parent’s Liberal score,” thus it could be on a future list of the most-woke companies.

Rhodes said Veebs, which launched in July, has about 100,000 users, “tens of thousands” of whom pay 99 cents a month for the premium experience. While there are users of all political stripes, he said “America-first” types and U.S. military vets are so far embracing it in larger numbers.

He compares Veebs to Consumer Reports magazine, “but instead of taking cars out on a test track and telling you how they run, we take companies and go down information rabbit holes and tell you what they stand for.”

Rhodes said it’s not necessarily a negative thing to show up on a most-woke list. Unilever’s Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream brand won’t lose any customers over it, for example.

“It all depends on what a company is selling and who they want to sell it to, and on the message they want to communicate.”