[CH] Frankenfood
Byron (byronbromley@tellink.net)
Mon, 11 Apr 2005 21:20:15 -0400
Maybe there is some real help on the way
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WHOLE FOODS ANNOUNCES GMO LABELING INITIATIVE
By Sarah Morgan
Whole Foods Market announced this week that it will begin labeling
some products with regard to genetically modified organisms.
Whole Foods¹ private-label brands will soon be labeled as to whether
or not they are GMO free. The announcement was made at the store¹s
annual stockholder¹s meeting in New York City.
"We've decided that we're going to take more of a leadership role on
[this issue]," chief executive officer John Mackey said at a
shareholders¹ meeting, according to reports from Supermarket News.
Some shareholders have been pushing for such a decision on labeling
since 2001. Until now, Whole Foods has been wary of beginning such a
labeling process, as the Food and Drug Administration has no guidelines
for labeling genetically engineered foods.
Although the company did not say when the new labeling would be
implemented, Mackey said Whole Foods would move forward with the
initiative and was already in the early stages of re-evaluating its
ingredient auditing processes, according to reports from Trillium Asset
Management, a Whole Foods shareholder advocating the change.
Whole Foods said that additional information and updates would be
available on its Web site.
Mackey told shareholders that Whole Foods had its best year ever in
2004, with a 23 percent increase in sales over 2003 and is now listed
as
a Fortune 500 company, according to Supermarket News.
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L.B.