Sometimes a project you think will be relatively simple turns
into something much bigger. And that can be a good thing.
Last week, we announced the winners of the OCA’s Top Right to
Know Grocers Contest, a project of our
Organic Retail and Consumer Alliance Campaign. Because the
number of nominations far exceeded our expectations, and because
the nominees were so impressive, we expanded the number of
winners to the
Top 12 Overall – the Diligent Dozen – plus the
top 10 by five regions: Northeast, Southeast, Central,
Northwest and Southwest.
Phase one of the contest has ended, but the project is far from
over. One of the purposes of our contest was to acknowledge and
promote the industry-leading best practices of the winning
grocers. But our overarching goal is to help the natural foods
and organic industry take the essential next steps in working
together as producers, distributors, grocers and consumers to
drive GMO products out of our food system. We invite input from
grocers, growers, manufacturers and consumers on how best to
accomplish this.
In the meantime, we’re hearing from a lot of you about stores
that weren’t nominated this time around (not to worry, we’ll run
the contest again next year), and we’re happy to see that many
of you are visiting the stores’ pages on
our contest site,
to congratulate them, or to ask them to open a store in your
community. We think it’s great that these stores are getting
some much-deserved attention for the hard work they do. And it’s
good to know that consumers care about this list, and want to
contribute to it in the future. Please keep your comments and
suggestions coming!
Of course, some of you had, and still have questions. Why wasn’t
your favorite store included? Why was store ABC chosen as a
winner instead of the store you nominated?
Several of you asked for clarification on the contest criteria.
We struggled a bit with this, because of the sheer variation in
the sizes and business models of the nominees. How do you
compare stores with sales of under $1 million, with large
multi-store chains with sales over $100 million? Or
brick-and-mortar stores with online-only retailers?
In the end, we went with the somewhat subjective process of
evaluating which grocers are working most aggressively to keep
GMO products off of their store shelves, to remove suspect
products already in their inventory and to provide the most
comprehensive labeling system for GMO and non-GMO products.
But to narrow down the lists, we had to look at other factors,
too. For instance, we included only grocers that stock a wide
variety of products that one would expect to find at a grocery
store, including those products most likely to contain soy, corn
and canola, and to a lesser extent cotton seed oil and sugar
beet sugar – in other words, products that consumers want, but
for which grocers have to work very hard to find non-GMO
versions.
We learned a lot from the comments sent in by consumers, about
why they thought their stores were winners. And we learned even
more by connecting with all of these stores that are so
committed to providing consumers with truthfully labeled,
healthy, organic, locally sourced, non-GMO foods. For example,
who knew that there were so many grocers out there whose produce
sales are 95 percent – 100 percent organic? Or whose overall
store sales are 50 percent or more organic? Or that so many
grocers are taking the initiative to purchase or promote
organic, local, fair trade, grass fed/pastured, and where legal,
raw dairy products are sold?
Several grocers said that they tell their customers that the
best way to protect themselves from GMO is to read labels and to
buy organic. Others talked about the importance of their
gatekeeping role, as an expression of their stores’ values and
mission, which include protecting customers from
GMO-contaminated products and pressuring manufacturers to
transition from GMO ingredients. “Stringent,” “fanatical,”
“militant” and “uncompromising” are some of the adjectives store
owners and managers used to describe their passion for saying
NO! to GMOs entering their stores.
One of our favorite conversations took place with Jimbo Someck,
of
Jimbo's Naturally!. Jimbo’s is a leader in working with
other grocers to remove GMOs from their stores. Jimbo told us
about a conversation he had with Dean Nelson of Dean's Natural
Foods Market, where he asked Dean when he was going to stop
allowing GMO products into his store. Not long afterward, Dean’s
Natural Foods was nominated for the contest by a consumer who
wrote: “Dean will not sell ANY GMO foods in any of his stores!”
When we spoke with Dean, he told us how much Jimbo's non-GMO
commitment and practices inspired him to decide this spring to
no longer allow any suspect new products into his three New
Jersey stores, and to remove products already on the shelves as
quickly as store buyers can find alternatives.
We also enjoyed hearing from Art Ames, General Manager of the
Berkshire Co-op Market. Art said that the market used the
purchasing power of its 16 co-ops, with cumulative annual sales
of more than $150 million, to send a clear message to
manufacturers: Either remove GMO ingredients from your products,
or we’ll discontinue buying them.
These are just a couple examples of grocers supporting each
other in the quest to go GMO-free. To help further these efforts
we will be compiling an online grocers tool kit to document and
share in more detail winning non-GMO policies and strategies.
OCA will also be sharing best practices of grocers working with
their livestock producers to source GMO-free feed. Finally, we
will be sponsoring another contest next year, and we look
forward to receiving even more nominations for more
industry-leading grocers!
Patrick Kerrigan is retail
education coordinator for the
Organic
Consumers Association.
Organic Consumers Association
- 6771 South Silver Hill Drive, Finland MN 55603 To subscribe or visit go
to:
http://www.organicconsumers.org/
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_27830.cfm