Wisconsin Shuts Down Soy-free Egg Market: Denies Consumers Choice to Purchase Healthy Eggs

People with allergies to soy protein now have one less source for purchasing soy-free eggs. Two small-scale farmers in Wisconsin have been informed by the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture that they must stop selling their soy-free and GMO-tested eggs to consumers until they meet state government regulations for shipping eggs that they allege the farmers are violating. They have been shipping their eggs directly to the homes of customers throughout the United States since the beginning of 2010. In letters dated, March 13, 2017, the State of Wisconsin sent two farmers who are part of the Wisconsin Pasturelands Cooperative a Cease and Desist order regarding their eggs. The two farmers were informed that they were selling eggs and shipping them to consumers without proper refrigeration during shipping. They were specifically instructed that until this situation is corrected, “you shall not hold, process, package or sell the eggs for human consumption from your home or any other location.” The farmer cooperative run by Amish in rural Wisconsin since 2010 has been working together with an Internet business, Tropical Traditions (now Healthy Traditions), to market their eggs from cage-free chickens fed a specially developed feed that contains no soy, no corn, and ingredients that are tested to be free from GMOs and the herbicide glyphosate. They are believed to be one of the first ones in the U.S. to offer eggs from chickens on a soy-free diet. The eggs were marketed under the Grass-fed Traditions brand, which is now part of the Healthy Traditions product line offering alternatives to commodity food. Healthy Traditions tests their products for the presence of GMOs and the herbicide glyphosate. While the State of Wisconsin is claiming that the farmers are violating regulations for the refrigerated transportation of eggs, there is no indication that these regulations apply to consumers transporting their own eggs, whether they are transporting the eggs themselves directly from the farm, or paying someone else to ship them on their behalf.

New Healthy Traditions Website Launched Featuring GMO-tested and Glyphosate-tested Products

Visitors to TropicalTraditions.com and other websites owned by Tropical Traditions, including Grass-fed Traditions and Household Traditions, will now notice that they are doing their shopping on HealthyTraditions.com. In 2002 Tropical Traditions was formed to distribute Virgin Coconut Oil made by hand by small-scale producers in the Philippines. Tropical Traditions was the first one to introduce "Virgin Coconut Oil" from the Philippines to the U.S. market. Demonized for years as "unhealthy" due to the high content of saturated fat in coconut oil, there were very few places where one could purchase coconut oil in 2002, and the few sources available were generally highly refined coconut oils. Tropical Traditions changed the market and the public's perception regarding coconut oil and saturated fats, and today coconut oil is widely available in stores everywhere and only considered unhealthy by those misinformed by the propaganda against saturated fats. Today, the business is so much more than just a coconut oil company, and as the company continues to grow and develop unique healthy products that are hard to find elsewhere in the market, they are now bringing all of their product lines under the banner of "Healthy Traditions" to more accurately describe the mission of the company.

Tropical Traditions Increases Healthy Traditions Product Line: Emphasizing GMO and Glyphosate-tested Products

2016 looks to be a very promising year for our new Healthy Traditions product line. In late 2015, Tropical Traditions stopped carrying the USDA certified organic seal on all of their own products. Replacing the USDA organic standards is a new, more rigorous standard of classifying the types of products Tropical Traditions sells to the public. It is not a new standard for Tropical Traditions, as the new logos and product standards implemented reflect our values and quality of food that we have offered to the public since we started selling products in the United States in 2002. We made the decision to not continue certifying our products as USDA Organic late in 2014, when we discovered that most of the USDA Organic grains we were selling to our customers had residue amounts of glyphosate, the active ingredient in popular herbicides, the most well-known being Round-up, the #1 herbicide in the world. Tropical Traditions has a ZERO tolerance level for GMOs, herbicides, and pesticides, and since the USDA National Organic Program (NOP) allows small residue amounts of pesticides and herbicides approved by the EPA for conventional crops to be present in USDA Organic certified products, we knew that we had to develop our own standards to both use in purchasing products directly from producers, as well as to educate our consumers on our own values and standards.

Tropical Traditions Coconut Oils and Coconut Products Now All Glyphosate-tested

Tropical Traditions has finished testing all of their coconut oils and coconut products for the presence of the herbicide glyphosate. They now have a system in place to test each batch of coconut oil or coconut products exported from the Philippines for the presence of glyphosate. The Tropical Traditions Gold Label Virgin Coconut Oil also carries the "Traditionally Produced" label, since this coconut oil is not mass produced by machine. It is a traditionally produced coconut oil made by hand in small batches, much the same way people in the Philippines have produced it for thousands of years. Tropical Traditions was the first company to import virgin coconut oil from the Philippines in 2002, and it remains one of the only premium coconut oils in the United States that is still produced using traditional methods, rather than being mass-produced by machine.

Tropical Traditions Announces New GMO-Tested Product Standards

Tropical Traditions recently announced that they had established their own standards for non-GMO products. The new standard is "GMO-Tested." While other non-GMO claims might have as much as 1% presence of genetically modified DNA present, the Tropical Traditions GMO-Tested standard has a zero percent tolerance for the presence of genetically modified materials.