CityFood Magazine, Vancouver, Spring, May, 2002

The Business of Organics- Issues

As it now stands there will be four categories:
1) 100 percent organic
2) "organic (denoting the product is made with at least 95% organic ingredients)
3) made with organic ingredients (must be at least 70 %)
4) "those with less than 70% organic ingredients" which may be declared in the information panel but not on the front of the packaging. This will make for a slight improved situation in Canada where due to the much tougher legislation over the use of the term "organic" local producers sometimes found themselves barred from using the term at all even though their product had more actual "organic" content than its imported competitor which was conspicuously labelled with the term.

To be fair to the big guys its not just the industrial giants who are jumping on the organic bandwagon. Many small companies struggling in overcrowded markets have found competitive market share by re-inventing themselves as organic companies.

With all the hype and babble, how can the consumer be assured that what he is getting is the real thing? The same way he had to before. By patronizing whenever possible, local producers and choosing smaller companies who have greater control of the entire scope of their operation. Take olive oil as an example. On the grocery shelves you'll find a plethora of local and imported products. Many of them labelled organic and all of them at various prices. One might be Golden Olive 'Eleni' certified organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil, which is produced from the family-owned company's own olive groves in Greece and brought to British Columbia in small quantities where it is bottled in B.C. Another might be an organic oil produced from olives from Morocco and Spain, bottled at a factory in Italy and shipped in huge semi containers. They may very well be entirely honest organic products, but in which case could you pick up the phone 604-460-0087 and talk to the producer about it? The choice would seem to be obvious.

Taken From:
CityFood Magazine

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