Are you having your food product Non-GMO Project Verified?
The process is a lengthy one — we know. But totally worth it! We’ve gone through the process ourselves, so we understand. But the good news is that with this experience, we are able to help our own customers understand their oil ingredients and get the right documentation for their verification process.
If you are starting this process (or going through R&D for your ingredients with plans to get verified later), it’s important to understand how your different ingredients are classified, and how the categorization can affect your verification process.
The Non-GMO Project has deemed 3 primary classifications for the ingredients that you put in your food: low risk, monitored risk and high risk.
If you want to learn more about what GMO is and these definitions, you can read more and find the full list of at-risk crops here.
Since we deal primarily with oils, we will go through each of your likely ingredients and place them on the scale of low to high ingredient risk.
Low risk items are ingredients that are not genetically modified, and have little to no chance of being contaminated with other ingredients that are GMO.
These ingredients are monitored risk because suspected or known incidents of contamination have occurred and/or the crops have genetically modified relatives in commercial production with which cross-pollination (and consequently contamination) is possible (source).
A great example of these oils is Non-GMO Canola or Non-GMO Soybean Oil. These oils are the non-gmo ocounterparts to their industry standard cousins, who are grown using GMOs.
They are grown using strains of the seeds that have never been genetically modified.
High risk oils are ingredients like canola and soybean — products that are usually genetically modified in the current food industry.
These are currently the industry standard, so unless the oils below state non-gmo in the title, you can expect them to contain GMOs. If you are verifying your product Non-GMO, stay away from these oils.