What You See Is What You Get: Clean Food Labels

Are you a “clean eater”? We don’t mean how thoroughly you wash your produce or whether you finish every morsel on your plate.

Clean eating broadly touches on nutrition, and personal and environmental health. It’s the choice to eat simple, more naturally derived foods that are minimally processed and without artificial additives. It’s about eating foods that are recognizable as food. We know almonds grow on trees, but where does sodium nitrite come from?

Thus Clean Food Labeling means transparency about what is in your food. Here’s what we think clean labeling is:

Left Coast Naturals’ Director of Marketing, Johanna Israel-Duprey, talks about Clean Labeling in The Vancouver Sun. 

Food Companies Cleaning Up Their Act

Consumers are informed and the demand for clean labeling continues to increase. So what are food manufacturers doing to clean up ingredient labels?

Food titans such as Nestle, Mars and General Mills are feeling the public pressure and removing artificial colours and flavours from their products. We’re not saying these foods are necessarily good for you. After all, “free of” stickers are not helpful if a product’s actual ingredients are still junk. Keep reading the fine print.

But this is a step in the right direction. Consumers are raising the standard for all of us.

What We’ve Tried

How can companies be more transparent? Here’s what we’ve tried so far:

• Products we make: although organic regulations do not allow the use of GMOs, we double certify with Pro-Cert organic certification and the Non-GMO Project so people know they’re getting food from a clean supply chain.

• And from day one, our Hippie Foods line was based on the philosophy “to celebrate a movement that re-introduced us to natural foods. Everything we make uses pure, simple, whole food ingredients, they way they’ve always been in nature. What a radical idea!”  You’ll never find preservatives or ingredients like high fructose corn syrup in Hippie Foods.

• Products we carry (such as Lotus Foods, Runa drinks, and Late July Snacks): we grade every brand on everything from their sourcing to environmental practices before we decide to carry it.

• Bulk foods we distribute: you never know what’s really in the bulk bin. So we created an online database for the 200 organic bulk foods we carry so people could know everything about their foods, including ingredients, nutritional information, country of origin, factoids, recipes, cooking instructions, allergens, and even the farmer’s story.

• All foods we carry: as a distributor we created the first official Non-GMO Policy in North America. We cleared our entire catalogue of products containing GMOs.

What do you want to know about your food? What do you want to see on food labels? Comment – we’d love to hear your thoughts!