Summary: Mexican dairy giant, Lala Group, makes a big splash of investing in local clean water projects, but fails to mention it is their own expanding dairy business that threatens waterways and drives water scarcity in the first place.
The people at Lala know the trick of turning your own-made environmental disaster into a goodwill bonanza.
First, illegally use up pretty much all the water in the ecologically unique nature reserve next to your gigantic dairy farms, resulting in dried-up lakes and devastated communities elsewhere. Then, (allegedly) use local officials to forge documents while the national control agency turns a blind eye. Of course, it helps that the director of this agency at the time was a former CEO of… You guessed it, Lala Group!
Congratulations, you’ve now turned a once-thriving lake into “vast white plains of cracked earth” and the drinking water (to the extent that any remains) is left unusable, with toxic levels of arsenic.
The problem is that not everyone is convinced that drying up nature reserves and poisoning drinking water is such a great thing after all. Luckily it’s easily fixed by drowning these stories with your own story about how you built some wastewater plants and are supporting local water projects. There, you’re not a criminal anymore, you’re one of the good guys!
Time to move on to win some environmental prizes: in 2023 Lala won an award for sustainable packaging and in 2025 got ranked the 13th most responsible company in all of Mexico. Can you taste the irony? Or is it arsenic?
With all this goodwill in the bag, it’s time to level up, as Lala is set to scale up and expand the business even further in the Americas. This means using up more of the already scarce water, producing more waste, and more pollution. All while parts of Mexico are facing a water crisis.