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.
From the company’s website:
What is GMO-tested?
GMO-tested is a higher standard than non-GMO verified or certified. We test any food that has a GMO equivalent before selling it to you, and we have a ZERO percent GMO tolerance. Other non-GMO verified or certified programs allow some percentage of GMO presence, usually close to 1%. GMO-Tested, on the other hand, means we tested for the presence of GMOs, and found NONE – ZERO percent. If we find ANY GMO present, we do NOT sell it.
Corn is by far the most problematic product to source GMO-free. Since we had to pull some of our own organic corn off the market due to very small amounts of GMO present, we decided to also test products in the market that had non-GMO verified labels. We found that two out of the three products we tested that were labeled non-GMO indeed had GMO DNA present. So we knew that making a statement or having a standard of GMO-free was not enough: every batch of products that had GMO equivalents present in the environment needed to be tested for GMO DNA, particularly corn. Any corn product we sell will have every batch tested prior to bringing to market.
Our GMO-Tested logo is only placed on products that have an equivalent GM product in the environment. We feel making non-GMO claims about products which currently have no GM varieties can be confusing and misleading to the consumer.
When you see the Healthy Traditions GMO-Tested logo, you can be assured that it is to distinguish it from GMO products of the same variety in the market, and that we have tested that product prior to bringing it to market. Products which do not have any GM equivalent variety do not need to be tested, unless there is evidence that cross-contamination can occur, such as grains milled in large feed mills that also mill corn or other GM products.
All of our testing is done by a third-party testing laboratory, Eurofins, which is the industry leader in GMO testing in both Europe and the United States. All of our laboratory test results will be displayed here on our website.
For more about the GMO-Tested standard, and which products are tested, visit Tropical Traditions.