What Do Those Little Yellow Stickers Mean?

By Susan Stewart, Organic Retail Certification Coordinator

Shopping for organic food is a choice - a buying decision for every customer to make based on priorities and personal preferences. To help shoppers quickly and easily find certified organic products among conventional products, throughout the Co-op there are little, round yellow stickers on products that say "Certified Organic" around a mini-version of the Wedge logo. Our little yellow sticker is something we use to highlight certified organic products in Bulk, Produce, HBC, Cheese and on bulk teas, herbs and spices.

What the stickers do not mean is that the Wedge itself certifies organic products. Only approved certifying agencies can do that. Any product "wearing" our yellow sticker has certification papers from a third-party certifier. When you look at a product that says "certified organic" or "organic," the logo or name of the third-party certifier should be on the product label - it will say "certified by (name of certifier)" somewhere on the package, often near the nutritional information or the ingredients list. Just like nutritional information, the front of a package is not the most accurate place to look.

If a product label claims to contain "certified organic ingredients," but there is no logo of a certifier, that final product has not gone through certification even if all its ingredients are organic. In other instances, for example, a bread might list certified organic flour as an ingredient, but the bread as a whole may not be certified organic because it contains other non-organic ingredients.

The labels will guide you! We are in the process of updating the signs in the Bulk department, so some certified organic products are not yet tagged with the yellow stickers, however, the bin labels can serve as your guide. Also, the menu above the Juice Bar does not indicate all the organic products, so feel free to ask our staff members if you have any questions. Our Juice Bar is certified organic, and there will be updates on the new menu when that goes in.