Big news: We just announced that our 273 U.S. stores have been certified organic by CCOF (California Certified Organic Farmers). Those of you who’ve been paying attention know that we’ve been a certified organic retailer since 2003 – a voluntary certification that’s not required by the USDA. So what’s the big deal now? Well, last November, the USDA told us that it was about to get much harder to be a certified retailer. Rather than walk away from certification altogether, we opted to go down the much more difficult road of getting each of our stores individually certified. The USDA was right: it was much harder. But we did what it took and made it happen. That’s the news.

Here’s a bit of context. When USDA’s National Organic Standards went into effect in 2002, they defined organic in great detail, down to the specific substances that could be used, and required that everyone who handles organic food – growers, ranchers, processors, etc. – be certified by a USDA-approved third party organic certifier. Everyone, that is, except retailers. Huh? Yes, the whole supply chain for organic products must be certified, with the tiny exceptions of retailers and restaurants. These exceptions were made because they thought it would have been prohibitively difficult and expensive for all the retailers that carried unprotected organic food to get certified (by “unprotected” I mean unpackaged, like produce, meat, bulk grocery, etc.). So the USDA told retailers that they still had to follow the rules, but they wouldn’t have to be certified. And we told the USDA something to the effect of “So you think it’s too hard for retailers to get certified? We’d like to respectfully prove you wrong.”

And we did. In 2003, Whole Food Market became the first national certified organic retailer, joining a few other small retailers that didn’t have national scope. Since we were certified as a “group,” our certifier inspected a representative sampling of our stores along with our overall company policies and systems for monitoring compliance. This is the same group process used for farm collectives where many small farms are grouping their product together. In November 2008, the USDA told retailers that they could no longer be certified as groups, and that each individual store would have to be inspected. While this was more expensive and labor intensive, we signed up all of our stores for inspection because we believe the integrity it brings the “organic” label is so important.

As part of the transition in the certifying process, we chose to work with California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) as our certifier. They have been certifying organic farms and producers since 1973 and act as both a certifying agent and a non-profit advocacy group for organics. The people we work with at CCOF are visionary leaders in organics, and they truly share our view that the organic label should be meaningful and used with integrity.

So, are you wondering exactly what these inspectors do in our stores? They are looking at our practices that involve unpackaged organic products. Obviously, you don’t need to do much to make sure a box of organic cereal stays organic. But we do have a lot to do when it comes to produce, bulk, meat, bakeries, cheese and even some salad bars. Here are just a few examples:

• The rules don’t allow “commingling” or touching between organic and non-organic foods. Throughout the stores, we go to great lengths to ensure that organic and conventional never touch.
• When sanitizing a surface that touches food – knives, cutting boards, displays, bins – we’re required to completely remove any sanitizer residue, and our team members keep written logs showing that they’ve removed cleaner and sanitizer from food contact surfaces.
• Whether it’s from a small local grower or a larger farm in another state, our organic produce has to come from certified organic growers. CCOF makes sure we have current certification documentation for any unpackaged products we’re handling and selling.



• Every team member who handles organic food needs to understand what the standard requires, so we’ve designed training programs to help. (These include a sing-along video about sanitation practices, and a video game called “The Organic Avengers,” with villains named “The Contaminator” and “The Commingler.” I am not joking; just ask any team member!) The certifier verifies that our teams are well-trained and have the knowledge they need to uphold the standard.

Again, I just want to reiterate that this program is not required by the USDA, and few other retailers go to the effort to become certified. Our stores are certified organic to give our customers more trust in the organic label. For us, it’s important for you to know that everyone who handles your organic food has been certified – instead of everyone but the retailer.

Why am I grinning ear-to-ear on this steamy hundred-degree day in the middle of Texas? The reason is this press release, which announces our commitment to the Non-GMO Project and represents the culmination of a very long and complicated undertaking. I’ve been working on this project – helping the company come up with a way to truly verify our efforts to avoid Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in our private label products – for just over five years, and it would be an understatement to say that I’m ecstatic about this announcement. I’d even go so far as to say that this moment makes me extremely optimistic about the future of our food supply and the persistence, energy and integrity of the natural and organic food visionaries who propel our industry forward.

What’s a GMO?

It’s simple: scientists combine the DNA of a plant with the DNA of something else and create a novel organism that has heretofore not existed in nature. The companies who make and sell the bioengineered crops will tell you all about the “exciting potential” of these crops to end hunger and create radical new super-nutritious foods. In reality, the GMO crops currently approved and marketed in the United States do one of two things: (1) make their own pesticides or (2) resist herbicides, so that farmers can spray an entire field with a strong chemical herbicide and kill everything but the GMO crop. Most of the U.S. corn, soy, canola and cotton is grown using one of these two technologies.

Why do we care?

Among Americans who are even aware that there are GMOs in the food supply (less than 50%, according to one study), prevailing beliefs about GMOs range from “They’ll save the universe” to “They’re utter toxic poison.” The topic is obviously very controversial, but what Whole Foods Market knows for certain is that our customers have told us very clearly that they’d like to avoid GMOs in their food. In fact, in a poll we conducted just last month, more than 80% of those we surveyed said they would seek out non-GMO products with clear labeling and would be willing to pay more for these products. Bioengineering of food is, for many, simply inconsistent with the very basic idea of natural food. We’re drawing a very important line in the sand and supporting shoppers looking to avoid GMOs.

What’s the Non-GMO Project?

Early on in this initiative, we realized that we couldn’t do this alone. Creating a standard and a program to verify products as avoiding GMOs would take an incredible level of technical expertise, and it would take the participation and commitment of other retailers, food makers, certifiers and growers in order to even get off the ground. About three years ago, we learned about a group of retailers who shared our concerns about GMOs and were already working on the issue, as we were. They had formed a non-profit organization called the Non-GMO Project. The tenacity and energy of these early supporters – Good Earth Natural Foods, The Natural Grocery Company, The Big Carrot Natural Food Market, and others – gave the Non-GMO Project its start, and we were happy to join the project as a founding leader, along with a number of other natural food companies. Learn more about the Project’s early history here. With the incredible leadership and technical expertise of our Board of Directors and Technical Advisory Board, we created a standard and a system for keeping GMOs as far from the natural food industry as possible.

How will this affect my life as a shopper?

You’ll start to see the “Non-GMO Project Verified” seal on products in our store starting this fall. We are going to enroll our house brands – 365 Every Day Value and Whole Foods Market – in the project. In fact, a few products are already verified. A number of other manufacturers, including Eden Foods, Nature’s Path Organic and Lundberg Family Farms, have also had products verified under the standard. You can see the full list on the Non-GMO Project website.

Since they were first introduced, GMO crops have expanded continually so that they now make up an astonishingly large portion of American agriculture, and we know that they’re just plain inconsistent with what we and the people who shop with us want. The Non-GMO Project’s success is critical to the continued availability of non-GMO products in the U.S., and we hope you’ll join us in showing your support.

Consider signing up for the Project’s Consumer Pledge and becoming a fan on Facebook to stay up-to-date. To other retailers and food makers reading this, visit the site to learn how you can support the Non-GMO Project as well. Our success depends on the support of retailers, food makers, growers, shoppers and everyone with an interest in keeping natural food natural. Join us!

Ludicrous yes. True no. We’d have to be insane to push for weaker organic standards. A strong standard gives food shoppers something to trust. The “organic” label represents a strong regulation that ensures the food is grown without toxic and persistent chemicals on environmentally friendly farms. We fought hard for decades to get that regulation established and the last thing we’d want to do is jeopardize its value by chipping it away.

A small and passionate group of people who wanted to create a natural and organic alternative to the mainstream conventional grocery stores of the era opened the doors of our first tiny store 30 years ago, about four blocks from where I’m sitting now. Since day one, we’ve supported organic agriculture, and we now offer more organic products than our founders could have imagined back in 1980. And we add more and more year after year. Here are some basic facts about our commitment to organic:

• We offer more organic products and devote more space in every store to organic food than any other supermarket.
• Since 2005 we have seen our sales of organic produce increase by more than70%.
• For produce alone, we work with more than 1,000 certified organic producers.
• Since our beginning, we have done more than any other retailer to support and grow organic agriculture in the U.S. Every single year, we have increased the amount of organic products that we sell.
• Everything we sell that is not organic must pass our own strict quality standards, and we sell both natural AND organic products because our customers want us to, and because not all products are available as organic.
• We define “natural” foods in our stores as products that meet our quality standards. These standards are the product of decades of research and aren’t the least bit vague about what ingredients are allowed in our stores.
• We have always pushed for strong organic standards and will continue to work actively to ensure that the integrity of the USDA label is not diluted. Strong national standards make it easier for Americans to trust the meaning of the organic label.
• We helped create the National Organic Standards, and we served from 1995 to 2000 as the retail representative on the National Organic Standards Board.
• We are the first national certified organic grocer, becoming certified in 2003. Even though the organic standards don’t require retailers to be certified, we decided to open the doors of each of our stores to inspections by USDA-accredited certifying agents, who make sure that what we’re selling as organic is truly organic.
• Whole Foods Market will continue to take an active role in ensuring that the USDA definition of “organic” matches the expectations of our shoppers. I personally attend nearly every meeting of the National Organic Standard Board, the stakeholder group that advises the USDA on organic agriculture. We carefully monitor any proposed changes to the regulation and work actively to make sure that the standards continue to represent a clear, strong definition of organic.

Speaking of Washington, it is an extremely happy time for organics at the USDA. You’ve probably heard about Michelle Obama’s garden on the White House Lawn, but have you heard of the organic “People’s Garden” at the USDA? Creating an organic garden at USDA was one of the first acts of new Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, and it serves as a very tangible representation of an unprecedented commitment to organic at the USDA. Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen Merrigan – #2 at the USDA – is one of the country’s foremost experts on organic agriculture. She helped author the Organic Foods Production Act and the National Organic Standards during her time as a congressional staffer, USDA administrator and National Organic Standards Board NOSB member, and most recently directed the graduate program in food policy at Tufts University. She has voiced her intention to make organic an integral part of all USDA programs, and to increasing enforcement of the organic standard. Leadership like this at the USDA is going to lead to a better-funded and more efficient National Organic Program and enable organic agriculture in the U.S. to seriously flourish.

Featherstone Fruits and Vegetables — Certified Organic Growers

Before 2002, there was no national legal definition of organic. Outside of the few states that had regulations, anyone could sell anything as organic without regulation of the agricultural practices they used. The national organic standards we have now are a huge step beyond the unregulated wilderness we had before, and it’s in all of our interest – retailers, growers, manufacturers and consumers – to stand together and make sure that definition stays strong. Undermining the standard serves no one.

Whole Foods Market is at the heart of organics, always has been and always will be.

If you’ve got questions about our support of organics, let me know and I’ll do my best to get ‘em answered.

“Organic” started out as a very informal set of ideas and practices based around the belief that agriculture should be done without toxic chemicals using environmentally beneficial methods. As organic grew throughout the 1970s and 80s, a number of standards emerged. Non-profit groups and state governments, in order to ensure shoppers were getting what they paid for when they bough “organic,” began to carefully define organic. As these various standards emerged, and demand for organic grew, Congress passed the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990, which directed the USDA to work with growers, certifiers, food producers, and the public to create a single national organic standard. Over the next twelve years, the USDA’s National Organic Program and the National Organic Standards Board (an advisory board made up of growers, certifiers, academics, consumers and industry representatives) worked to create a detailed, strong standard that would ensure that organic products met consumers’ expectation that they be produced without toxic chemicals, using earth-friendly methods. Our Vice President of Quality Standards, Margaret Wittenberg, served as the sole retail representative on the NOSB during this time. The USDA’s National Organic Standards were released in 2002, and represent one of the strongest governmental organic standards in the world. You can read more about those standards on our website.

“Natural,” on the other hand, doesn’t have a strong governmental definition when it comes to food, so my team (the Quality Standards Team) spends quite a lot of time defining which ingredients make up the natural foods we sell in our stores. The basic tenets of our standard require that our products are free of artificial preservatives, colors, flavors, sweeteners and hydrogenated fats. Getting to that point requires lots and lots of research on individual ingredients. The piles on my cluttered desk are made up of a lot of technical documents about food ingredients – food science textbooks and reference books, ingredient specifications that describe how an individual ingredient is made, governmental and regulatory documents from around the world, and dozens of very messy legal pads.

I’ve heard our role described as that of an editor - carefully “reading” the product selection and crossing out lines that don’t belong there – or as a gatekeeper - guarding the gates of our castles and fighting off the evil artificial ingredients attempting to invade. Both of these definitions are okay, but they don’t capture a few key features of what we do. First, since our products are picked out by hundreds (if not thousands) of buyers throughout our company, we function more as an army of editors or gatekeepers. And since our structure is so decentralized, our biggest responsibility is to empower the stores and teams that make up our company with information and tools they need to effectively edit the product selection, guard the gates and ensure the products in each of our stores meet our standards.

One of the most simple and important tools we give our team members is a list of ingredients, each marked acceptable or unacceptable. This list covers most of the food ingredients on the market and represents significant research into where it’s from, how it’s made, and what our stance is. For every ingredient reviewed, we try to answer: “Is this something that our shoppers would expect to find in a natural food?”

Some ingredient reviews are very straightforward. Artificial colors are banned, as are artificial flavors and preservatives. Preservatives such as citric acid – which is naturally derived – are acceptable, whereas preservatives like BHA and BHT – which are very clearly synthetic – are banned.

Other reviews get more complicated. L-cysteine is an amino acid that is used as a dough conditioner in bread products. Even though it’s a natural substance, we said no to it because it’s simply not necessary. It allows bread bakers to cut corners and replace traditional kneading and dough conditioning practices with an additive. We believed this was an unnecessary ingredient that our customers would be surprised to find in our products, so it got stamped “unacceptable.”

For another class of ingredients, we allow them but place additional requirements on how the ingredient label reads, so that our customers know what they’re getting. Lysozyme is a natural egg white-derived enzyme that’s added to certain foods. It’s natural and it’s safe, but we felt that the name “lysozyme” doesn’t make it clear that the product contains egg ingredients, which is important information to vegans and others who avoid egg products. Accordingly, we require that it be listed as “Egg white lysozyme” on the product label.

Another great example is caffeine. It’s naturally occurring in coffee, among other plants, and is occasionally used to give a boost to other beverages. Since it’s a natural substance, we consider it acceptable, but when it comes to energy drinks, we limit the amount and ask that the label give you clear information about what you’re getting. The level of caffeine is capped at 150 mg per serving (about what you’ll find in a strong cup of coffee), the front of the label must clearly state that the product contains caffeine, and the actual amount of caffeine, in milligrams, must be stated on the label. In other words, energy drinks need to make it clear that they’re energy drinks and not just soda. Natural energy drinks aren’t for everyone, and we wanted to make sure that you know what you’re buying before you (or your kids) end up with an unwanted caffeine buzz.

These are just a few varied examples illustrating how we create our food quality standards. Stay tuned for future posts on other examples of the work our Quality Standards team does and let us know if there’s a particular topic you’d like to see explored.

Just as I was breathing a sigh of relief, she hit me with this bombshell: Could you use the first post in the series to explain our Quality Standards in a way that an 11-year-old can understand? What!?

Seems that she was in our downtown Austin store over the weekend with her daughter’s 11-year-old friend, who had never been to our store before. She was thoroughly enthralled and amazed – remember your first step inside our store? Anyway, the friend asked, “Is everything here organic?” and Paige said “no” but that everything was natural. And then fumbled through various attempts at explaining what natural means – realizing as she rambled that a typical 11-year-old doesn’t have the background to understand how much junk is in our conventional food supply. Paige eventually came up with this: “You won’t find blue ketchup here because ketchup comes from tomatoes and tomatoes aren’t blue in nature.” And the friend got it: “So, ketchup is red here?” Yes.

I am so immersed in food and agricultural issues that I’m guilty of forgetting that there are many people who come to our stores without the abundance of food-related details that I deal with every day. We all have so much going on, who has time to delve into all the details unless it’s part of your job? So, I’ll take the challenge. Give me a minute to dust off my old nursery-school teacher skills (in a former life I taught at a tiny nursery school, a job which included managing the library of children’s books). An 11-year-old should be able to understand what makes Whole Foods Market different. Here goes. Welcome to Quality Standards Storytime.

Once upon a time there were only natural foods. I know this is obvious, but one of my most strongly-held beliefs about food is that we should pay attention to the diets that humans have followed for 200,000 years or so. Our bodies and brains evolved on a diet of unprocessed foods — mostly plants and nuts, some animal protein and very little else. The 50-100 years since the advent of food processing and artificial preservatives occupies about .05% of that timeline. I think it’s fairly logical to play it safe and stick to the diets that have proven safe and healthful for most of recorded time.

Then, sometime in the twentieth century, Artificial Preservatives, Colors and Flavors were invented by “food scientists,” devoted to improving the quality of our lives through science. The ability to color, flavor and preserve food indefinitely made it possible to recreate authentic-seeming foods and make them last virtually forever. Chicken flavoring with no actual chicken, snack cakes able to survive for 20 years, and that infamous blue ketchup all became possible. With modern food science, we became able to replicate and “improve upon” traditional natural foods, and make fake food products more cheaply than the authentic original.

The Organic and Natural Products movements were born in opposition to these changes, based on the belief that natural food is healthier, better for you and better tasting. As the conventional grocery industry got weirder and weirder, the group of resisters got bigger and bigger. Whole Foods Market was born out of that opposition, founded in 1981 as a natural alternative to mainstream grocery stores. Organic agriculture also followed a similar route, rising as a resistance movement to chemical/industrial agriculture during the 1970s and 80s.

While organic and natural come from similar roots, the word “organic” has come to describe the way that agricultural products are grown, raised and processed – without toxic or persistent pesticides and using environmentally friendly practices. “Natural” focuses more on how a multi-ingredient processed food is made and whether the specific ingredients are consistent with our definition of natural. Natural products can include both organic and non-organic agricultural products. Both of these approaches spring from similar perspectives, with a few key differences (and I’ll write more about those in future posts).

In a nutshell (actually, in an office building), the Quality Standard Team creates standards for the ingredients in the food in our stores, and ensures that what we say we do (”Offer the highest quality natural and organic foods”) matches up with what we actually do, with what’s actually on our shelves. I’ll get into some of the specifics in future posts, along with some of the notable myths and misconceptions about natural food. If there’s a particular topic you’d like us to delve into, let me know.

So, how did I do in making this clear enough for an 11-year-old? What did I miss? What would you say? Would love to hear your feedback.

Studies about Bisphenol-A (BPA), the plastic monomer used to make polycarbonate plastic, have been getting a ton of media attention lately, and our customers have had quite a few questions about it. While we certainly don’t have all the answers, we wanted to share with you what the research currently shows and what we, as a company, are doing to address the issue.

Over the past 20 years or so, polycarbonate plastic has become ubiquitous in the U.S. It’s very hard, as clear as glass – yet virtually unbreakable, lightweight and inexpensive. Because of these unique properties, it is used widely to make water bottles, aluminum can linings, and many other food containers. But in the past few years, a growing body of research has raised some difficult questions about polycarbonate plastic, and Bisphenol-A (BPA), the monomer out of which the plastic is made.

Dozens of studies have been published on the subject in the last few years, and they show that in certain quantities, Bisphenol-A can act as an endocrine disruptor. The human body essentially mistakes these substances for its own natural endocrine hormones, which can impact a number of systems in our bodies.

Some studies have also suggested that BPA can leach from polycarbonate plastic, although it has not been clearly established whether the amount of BPA that might leach from food containers causes harm. However, the research that has been done definitely raises some important questions, and we believe that much more work needs to be done to answer these questions and help consumers, businesses and the government understand the safety of this substance.

So, what are we doing on the issue? First, we’re closely following the research as it emerges and keeping our shoppers and team members informed. You can read more about our policies and some of the most recent research on our website.  A quick overview of some of the steps we’ve taken to date:

• In 2006, we were the first major U.S. retailer to completely ban the use of polycarbonate plastic in baby bottles and child drinking cups. Even though scientific consensus has not established that these products are harmful, we took this precautionary measure because of the emerging evidence of their risk.
• We are also actively supporting the transition away from polycarbonate plastic where alternative materials are available. About 2 ½ years ago, most of the individual reusable water bottles in our stores were made from polycarbonate; today this material represents just a small number of the bottles we sell. We’re also working with manufacturers in other areas (aluminum cans, for example) to encourage the development of alternative packaging.
• Our Quality Standards team is carefully following the research on this topic, and we’re working with some of the leading researchers in this field to understand their findings.

Our goal is to offer our shoppers alternatives to suspected endocrine-active packaging materials where they exist. Changing packaging is quite an involved process, and we promise that we will continue to closely examine the packaging materials used in our stores and search for the safest and most functional options.

I said, the research is ongoing into this issue and we want to know what you think about all of this. To that end, we’ve set up a discussion on Bisphenol-A in our online forum – please join us! This is a place for you to make a comment, share your concerns, alert us to research or anything else you want to share on the topic of BPA. We’ll keep you posted on the latest developments as we learn about them. We certainly don’t have all the answers but we are planning to stay on the leading edge of this issue and understand the questions.

We encourage you to join in the forum discussion instead of posting a comment on this blog entry.

My colleague Jody Villecco and I recently spent a few days on the backroads of New England, meeting the technical folks from two of our oldest supplier partners: Tom’s of Maine and Seventh Generation. Jody, I, and our team are the official “geeks” of Whole Foods Market; we spend most of our work lives researching products and their ingredients, buried in technical food science and nutrition reports, and generally geeking out about our products as we establish standards for what we sell in our stores. Fortunately for us, there are similar technical teams working at many of the companies whose products we sell, and the time we spend talking shop with them is educational, valuable to our work, and fun.

Our first stop on our New England tour was Southern Maine. After a visit to our great store in Portland, and a taste of the best blueberry cobbler in history, we spent the better part of day with very talented product development team at Tom’s of Maine. I don’t think you could have gathered a roomful of people with more combined knowledge of natural toothpaste, deodorant and soap anywhere in the world. On the agenda were quite a few items: talking about our new Premium Body Care Standards and how they would apply to oral care products, controversial ingredients like SLS and fluoride, and lots of good general discussion about the various ingredients that make up a good toothpaste or deodorant, and what’s effective and what’s not. These folks are committed to truly changing the perception that natural deodorant and toothpastes don’t work as well as their conventional counterparts, and Tom’s is one of the many talented companies on a path to show that natural products can work even better.

Natural cleaning products are also still fighting the perception that they don’t work well, and the average person believes that natural cleaning products aren’t capable of cleaning their home. Seventh Generation is out to shatter that misperception, and has been hard at work for decades creating product that are natural and actually work. Our team at WFM is currently in the process of studying cleaning products and their ingredients, to understand how they’re made, how they work well, and craft a standard to define safe, natural cleaning products for our stores. We rely on the knowledge, experience and technical expertise of our suppliers in this process, and we spent the day with Seventh Generation at their offices on Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vermont to talk shop for a day, and learn everything we could about how they create safe, natural cleaning and paper products. I was especially impressed by the good work they’ve done on understanding and sourcing natural fragrances  for their products (watch for Jody’s Whole Story blog post on natural fragrances, coming up in the next few weeks).

Be sure to check out Martin “Science Man” Wolf’s Q&A feature on their website. Martin’s vast experience, technical knowledge, and passion for natural products are incredible, and he’s definitely the go-to guy for natural cleaning questions. Getting to spend the day with Martin, along with other leaders from Seventh Generation, was a huge privilege that really expanded our understanding of what makes a good, natural and effective cleaning product.

Outside of the vast amount we learned about oral care products and cleaning supplies, New England (my homeland) is home to some of the most amazing food in the universe, namely seafood and maine blueberries. The regular (cultivated) blueberries you can buy all over the country may be plump, sweet, flavorful and amazing, but even an average Maine blueberry can blow the most amazing non-Maine blueberry out of the water. Wild blueberries are native to Maine, and their smaller size packs in a more potent and less tart blueberry flavor that seems to capture the rocky, salty landscape of Maine. They’re not as sweet as cultivated berries, and I find myself eating entire baskets full at a time. Besides tasting awesome, studies suggest that the wild variety is higher in antioxidants than the cultivated variety.

A quart of Maine blueberries, along with some Justin’s Nut Butter squeeze packs and a container of Dr. Krackers made for the perfect road trip powerfood on the 5 hour drive from Portland to Burlington, complete with a quick swing by Robert Frost’s old house in Franconia, NH and the most beautiful sunset I’ve seen in a long time. Returning to my New England roots for a few days was delicious, educational and beautiful!

Who we are and what we do

Look around near the doors of any one of our stores and you’ll likely find our commitment to “Selling the Highest Quality Natural and Organic Products Available” painted directly on the wall. This promise, the first of our company’s core values, seems simple at first glance, but becomes complicated once you start to consider the words “natural” and “organic” and what they really mean. I’ll save “organic” for another post, but what does “natural” mean, and who decides? Well, we do, and we take the job very seriously.

I work as part of our Global Quality Standards Team. We set the company’s standards for what we sell in our stores, including food ingredients, body care products, dietary supplements, meat, seafood, and virtually every other category of products in our stores. Our jobs are a sort of a hybrid of food science, chemistry and philosophy, as we review the ingredients, products and practices that go into our products. We’re not just studying the nitty gritty of how the ingredients are made, but how they fit into our belief that minimally processed food is better, and our promise to only sell natural food. We consider ourselves buying agents for our customers, rather than as sales agents for our suppliers, which in my mind is one of the best descriptions of what we do. Our work always starts with our promise to sell “the highest quality natural and organic products;” no matter how deep we get into the chemistry of how a given ingredient is made, the questions we’re trying to answer are “is this natural” and “would our shoppers be surprised to find this in a natural product?” Is it natural? How is it made? How is it extracted? Is it legal? Is it safe? Our buyers and stores are only allowed to bring in products that meet our strict standards.

Myth: There’s Hidden MSG lurking in our aisles

And now to this post’s aforementioned myth and/or misconception: Ever since the TV show 60 Minutes aired a story about MSG in the early 1990s, we’ve been getting calls and emails from customers concerned that there’s secret MSG hidden behind our labels. The short answer is that MSG, or monosodium glutamate, is an unacceptable ingredient at Whole Foods Market, thus not allowed in any of our products. We don’t allow it because it’s an artificial flavor enhancer that’s inconsistent with the idea of natural food. But the ongoing confusion about the ingredient is complicated, and requires us to look at some of the chemicals responsible for food tasting good.

The term “glutamate” refers to a number of forms of glutamic acid, an amino acid found naturally in many foods (and in our bodies). Cheese, milk, meat, peas, seaweed and mushrooms are a few of the foods containing the highest levels of natural glutamate, and this substance is largely responsible for the phenomenon of umami, the “fifth taste” of savory, meaty foods. In fact, the discovery of the link between glutamates and savory flavors led the Japanese food scientist Kikunae Ikeda in 1908 to the commercial development of monosodium glutamate. MSG is a synthetically derived and highly concentrated flavor enhancer that is almost completely made up of glutamates. It’s so powerful that just a few drops can drastically change the flavor of a dish.

As the 60Minutes story exposed, it’s also so powerfully concentrated that it can cause severe reactions in people who are hypersensitive to it. While the scientific basis of the set of symptoms known as “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” has been debated and doubted by many, the phenomenon has caused a lot of people to carefully and diligently avoid MSG. A number of consumer groups have claimed that certain food ingredients, such as autolyzed yeast and hydrolyzed protein, are MSG in disguise. They are not.

Autolyzed yeast and hydrolyzed proteins, among other ingredients, are completely natural ingredients that happen to be have substantial amounts of glutamates, but nowhere near the concentration found in MSG. While a small subset of people may be sensitive to even these small levels of glutamate, these ingredients are always clearly identified on the labels so that, as with all food sensitivities and allergies, people can be aware of ingredients they’d like to avoid. These are natural ingredients that are definitely of grave concern for people who are sensitive to them, but they are not MSG. We draw a clear line between natural glutamate-containing foods, which we allow, and highly concentrated MSG, which we don’t.

For further MSG reading:

The New York Times ran a good story on this issue back in March, although I wish they’d made a clearer distinction between MSG and the other glutamate containing additives.

Jordan Sands article “A Short History of MSG: Good Science, Bad Science, and Taste Cultures” appeared in the Fall 2005 Issue of Gastronomica (my very favorite food magazine). It’s not available online, but I’d recommend getting your hands on it if you can – hopefully your library has a copy floating around.

The short answer is “yes, it can,” but the long answer is far more complex and interesting. Let me take a few minutes to lay out some of the basic issues around organic agriculture in China, go over just what “organic” means in the US (or any country), talk to some leading organic experts and certifiers, and then let you decide whether organics from China are truly legit.

News stories about products from China have been largely negative over the past year: Dog food tainted with toxic melamine, fake pharmaceuticals, toys with lead paint, contaminated crops… All of these very serious safety issues have raised serious red flags about the quality of everything coming out of China. Shoppers, retailers, food makers and the media have all wondered: “If pollution is this rampant, and oversight is this lax, how can we trust anything grown or made in China?”

With organic food, the answer is complicated, but there are number of reasons we at Whole Foods Market feel good about our organic private label products from China. You can read more about some of the specific ways we make sure our organic private label products from China meet our standards here. Read on past the fold for more information about how U.S. law applies to organics grown outside the U.S., and what some experts see as opportunities to strengthen the system.

Organic 101

Some quick background: Before 2002, there were no national organic standards. Some states had their own organic regulations, but there was no nationally accepted legal definition of the term. As the organic market grew, so did the potential for fraud and the need for consumer protection. In 1990, Congress passed the Organic Foods Production Act, which directed the USDA to create a regulation to define exactly what “organic” meant on food sold in the U.S. Thus the National Organic Standards were born.

The USDA created this standard over the next ten years or so, advised by the National Organic Standards Board, (NOSB) a multi-stakeholder group made up of growers, ranchers, environmentalists, consumer representatives, retailers, and other organic experts. Through a transparent and public process of meetings and hearings around the country, the USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP) and the NOSB developed a thorough and comprehensive standard that governs how organic food is grown, raised and processed, and how it’s certified, overseen and marketed. This standard is still managed by the NOP and advised by the NOSB, who meet about twice a year to work on the standard and receive input from the public.

Anyone who wants to sell food as organic in the U.S. must be certified by one of the USDA’s accredited third-party certifiers. These certifiers are approved and supervised through a process called accreditation, by which the NOP audits and inspects the certifiers to make sure they’re enforcing the standard appropriately.

International Organics

One popular misconception out there is that organic food grown in another country is grown according to that country’s rules (or lack of rules). That’s just not true. Anyone growing food that’s going to be sold as organic in the U.S. is required to follow the U.S. standards and be certified by a USDA accredited certifier. A number of internationally-based certifiers are accredited by the USDA, and many U.S.-based certifiers have employees on the ground in other countries.

To help understand just how certification works on the ground in China, I talked to Jeff See, Executive Director of The Organic Crop Improvement Association (OCIA), one of the major U.S. certifiers working in China. “We follow the same system anywhere in the world. There are language differences, but we use translators and native speakers.”

Given the recent attention to pollution and food safety issues in China, See says they’ve strengthened their work in China. “Since 2005 we’ve really stepped up our oversight in China. It’s misinformation that the whole country is unable to be certified because of pollution. It’s a very large country, and there are parts that are largely unpolluted.”

A few of the experts I spoke to pointed out that it’s ironic that China is now so polluted, given that China once was home to one of the oldest strongest ecological agricultural traditions in the world.

“As the Buddha said, all truth must be paradox,” says Joe Smillie, Senior Vice President at Quality Assurance International, one of the leading organic certifiers in the U.S. “I’ve always believed that China was the original homeland of organics. The Chinese peasant throughout history is one of the best organic eco farmers that the world has seen.”

That peasant ecological farming tradition was largely pushed aside as the rising population in China’s cities caused immense pressure to increase food production starting in the 1960s.

“The move to increase food production dumped a lot of urea (from nitrogen fertilizers) and other pollutants into the countryside,” notes Smillie. “Nitrogen fertilizers increase your production at great environmental cost. A lot of China has been compromised, but at the core, that peasant spirit is alive and well in some areas.”

Chuck Benbrook, Chief Scientist at The Organic Center, agrees. “I think the Chinese were growing and consuming high quality organic food several centuries before we were in the US, so I think high quality organic food can definitely be grown in China. The real concern now is widespread contamination of soil, air and water with pollutants and industrial chemicals. NOP standards provide some guidance regarding how farmers and certifiers in China are supposed to address environmental contaminants, but questions persist regarding how effectively they are doing so.”

Another concern with organic production in China is that Chinese culture just doesn’t allow for the type of transparency that business in the US has gotten used to. Benbrook says that here in the US “there is a high degree of cultural, professional, economic and corporate pressure to follow the rules. In China, many people don’t feel the same the way about government rules. It’s more accepted to tip one’s hat to the rules but do what you need to do. That’s what worries me.”

“Some of the key challenges are that the infrastructure of organic certification requires a level of transparency and both planned and unplanned spot inspections; certification also requires an interface with government and access to government data, and that’s where China becomes a difficult and challenging environment” says Bob Scowcroft, Executive Director of the Organic Farming Research Foundation. “The government doesn’t handle implied mistrust very well, and that’s one basis of organic certification. Just showing up and saying ‘Surprise! I want to see your garden’ is a difficult proposition in China, given that it’s half the world away for US-based certifiers.”

These challenges to certification in China make certification more difficult for the certifiers, and the integrity of this process depends on the integrity of USDA’s oversight of the certifiers.

USDA Accreditation

Many in the organic community feel that the USDA’s accreditation process – the process by which they oversee and review certifiers – needs to be more public and open in order to ensure that the USDA is enforcing the standard. While the certifiers I spoke to said that the accreditation process keeps them on their toes, others said that they’d feel more confident in the system if it were more transparent.

“Considering the resources our country has given them, they’re doing a good job, and I’ve seen them make us make a lot of changes since the implementation of the standard, very good changes,” says See. “They have shadowed us in China and visited several of our operations in China as part of that accreditation, and we’ve been told they will be coming back again this year. They have found some points that we have to improve in China, and we are.”

“They come to our offices and can go through any file they want, a long list of things they have to do, based on ISO 61 guidelines, which are strict international guidelines that tell them how to accredit,” says Smillie. “They have to check us out and make sure we’re doing the right thing, and you have to show improvement. You have to really dance quick or you’re gone.” Smillie noted that USDA accreditation officials had also shadowed QAI’s inspectors on international audits.

Scowcroft believes that the USDA could do more to be transparent and open the accreditation process to the public: “This was never intended to be a black hole, it’s a public private partnership, and the USDA has done little to explain how they spot check certifiers and to what extent they enforce any infractions they do discover.”

“I haven’t seen the NOP invest time and political capital needed to enhance the accreditation process in the ways that are going to be necessary to bring the process in a country like China or India up to US standards,” said Benbrook.

The recently passed Farm Bill urged appropriators in Congress to allocate nearly $2 million a year in additional funding for the National Organic Program, and I hope that this chunk of this funding will go towards stronger, better and more public accreditation work at NOP. More resources and funding can only help the program, which struggles to oversee organic agriculture in the US on a limited budget.

Within the verification community, everyone’s trying to do their best with the resources they have” notes Scowcroft. “But there’s a question as to whether the resources they have match the incredible magnitude of the growing organic market.”

The NOP also just launched a new online reading room where they are posting documents related to certification and accreditation work. This site will help the organic community keep a close eye on the USDA’s work and directly review NOP accreditation documents. Any member of the public can now review NOP’s accreditation reports for any certifier online.

Scrutiny is a good thing.

Organic certification in China obviously raises some serious questions. While there’s definitely a system of oversight in place, pollution and lack of transparency in China is just cause to look very closely at all food from China, organic or otherwise. As I mentioned, we’ve gone to great lengths to make sure the organic private label products we import from China meet our own standards and the National Organic Standards. Our buyers and auditors visit the farms and facilities we buy from, and we have created testing protocols that test for pesticide and heavy metal residues. Our quality systems and test results suggest that the organic certification process is working well for these products.

So, to (longwindedly) answer the question, “Can organic products from China truly be organic?” We’ve found that they can, but we’ve also found that the question requires and deserves lots of scrutiny. I expect that this same question will be receiving a lot of attention in the coming months from organic shoppers, the media, non-profit groups and the USDA, and this increased scrutiny and accountability will hopefully lead to improved trust in organic products from the U.S. and around the globe.

But, in the meantime, we at Whole Foods Market aren’t waiting. We’ve been taking extra steps to make sure our organic products from all over the world are organic, and now we’re launching a new level of transparency about our products, where we get them, and how evaluate them. We’ll be updating our website with more info about in the coming weeks, and keeping you updated via this blog.