Demand for products that don’t contain genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, is exploding.
“We currently are at over $8.5 billion in annual sales of verified products,” says Megan Westgate, executive director of the Non-GMO Project, an independent organization that verifies products.
To receive the label, a product has to be certified as containing ingredients with less than 1 percent genetic modification. Westgate says that’s a realistic standard, while totally GMO-free is not.
But how does a company get into the non-GMO game? It might call FoodChain ID, a company in Fairfield, Iowa, that certifies products for the Non-GMO Project.
“We start looking at ingredients, and we identify what are all the ingredients,” says David Carter, FoodChain ID’s general manager. “And of course, the label itself doesn’t always identify all of those. So we need to be sure that we have a list of all the processing aids, the carriers and all the inputs that go into a product.”
Next, FoodChain ID figures out where each ingredient and input came from. If there’s honey in cookies, for example, the company will have to show that the bees that make the honey aren’t feeding near genetically modified corn. When there’s even the smallest risk that an ingredient could contain a modified gene, DNA testing is in order.
Read full, original article: How Your Food Gets The ‘Non-GMO’ Label