Being “green” is one of our most important missions at Whole Foods Market! Our Whole Body team, along with some of our biggest vendors, has been hard at work developing sustainable packaging standards requirements for all of the products we sell in Whole Body, including our own 365 Everyday Value™ and Whole Foods™ brands.

Enacting change by setting clear environmental packaging guidelines has the potential to alleviate environmental strain, reduce our carbon foot print and lead the way for other manufacturers to make these changes as well. Helping the planet while we help our customers find the best there is in supplements and body care!

Our Whole Foods brand of supplements is the number one selling supplement brand in our Whole Body departments. We have worked with our manufacturer to source a new 100% Post-Consumer Recycled (PCR) content plastic bottle for those Whole Foods products that are currently sold in the amber plastic PET #1 bottles.

Post-consumer recycled content bottles are made from other bottles that have been recycled. 100% PCR content bottles use less energy and water to produce. They generate far fewer greenhouse gases, while also diverting reusable materials out of the landfill and reducing our reliance on virgin petrochemicals. By some estimates, 100% PCR PET has a carbon footprint that is 60% smaller than virgin plastic.

It is important to note that our manufacturer is using PCR sources that are FDA approved and safe for food contact-providing the same barrier characteristics and shelf life of our previous bottles. They have identified multiple sources for this high quality PCR source resin and all of our products in PET #1 bottles will transition to this new material. And after you use the high quality Whole Foods brand supplements inside, toss the empty bottle in for your community recycling program to re-use again and again. These bottles can be recycled repeatedly for a substantial impact on total carbon emissions over the life of the plastic.

We are starting to convert products to the new bottles now, as we produce them, and expect the full product line of PET #1 bottles to be transitioned by late in 2010.

Finding the new bottles is easy. The labels have a leaf with this symbol on it:

Reducing virgin plastic consumption and still allowing for recyclability. Those are ideas we can all support!

As both a proud mom and a body care product developer for the Whole Foods Market brand, I have always taken care to use gentle and effective body care on my 5-year-old daughter. It thrills me to announce that our new, reformulated 365™ Body Care products meet the Whole Foods Market Premium Body Care standard! I’m now able to use excellent quality and budget-priced hair care as well as shower gels and lotions on my very active and dirty little girl.

Recently I spent the week with my family enjoying the crystal blue waters of Lake Tahoe and the fresh forest scents. Our spread-out family makes a yearly trip to the area and it was a good time to try out our new, reformulated 365™ Body Care products. Whole Foods Market launched the new shampoos, conditioners, shower gels and lotions in selected stores throughout the country in July and we hope to have full distribution in all stores by the end of the summer. My family tested them out and loved the new products – and the price – and I know yours will too.

Our Premium Body Care standard is stricter than that of many baby and kid’s lines. It doesn’t allow ingredients such as parabens, synthetic fragrances, polypropylene and polyethylene glycols, sodium lauryl and laureth sulfates. Whole Foods Market experts created the Premium Body Care standard to help our customers easily find safer, more natural body care products.

Our Whole Foods Market team worked for more than a year to reformulate our highly successful 365 Body Care products. It was a challenging proposition: How could we keep the formulas effective and cost-conscious while raising the bar by using only ingredients that meet our strict Premium Body Care standard? Surfactants, the ingredients that make products lather up, are some of the most expensive and difficult ingredients to source at budget formula cost with Premium Body Care standard quality. We succeeded, though, and our new formulas are gentle, effective and affordable for everyone! Working on the team that reformulated these products gives me a new appreciation for the way a group of people on a mission can accomplish great things.

Fresh mint, lavender flowers and zesty citrus scents made from pure essential oils are the reasons I’ve always loved our original 365 Body Care products. We still have these favorites along with a fragrance-free version for those who do not need or want a scented product. We worked hard to make sure we kept the things our customers loved while we made our improvements.

We hope you and your family will like the new products as much as we do. We are very proud of the new formulas and, since we like to have fun while we do our jobs at Whole Foods Market, my Team Leader, Jeremiah McElwee, and I thought we would share some shots of our sudsy kids getting creative with the bubbles from our new products. Now that we’ve made our great body care products even better, we hope you and your family will give them a try and let us know what you think.