A Message From Our Friends at Applegate

Since Applegate was founded more than 25 years ago, we have been working towards our goal to Change the Meat We Eat. By “change,” we mean making the types of food people love to eat – like hot dogs, deli meat and bacon – with clean ingredients and meat sourced from family farmers who raise animals humanely; without the use of antibiotics or growth hormones. Transparency has been a core value for us since the beginning, and we feel strongly that people have a right to know what’s in their food. This is what led us to contribute to the Just Label It campaign and fully support the labeling of GMO food products.

In addition to supporting efforts like JLI, we’re walking the walk. We recently turned inward and took a tough look at our products, determined how GMOs impact them, and identified areas where we can improve. Here is what we found and what we’ve done since:

• Good news! Our Certified Organic products, which follow the USDA National Organic Program’s rules against GMO ingredients and feed, have always been and will always be GMO-free.

• With the help of third party experts, we reviewed every ingredient in our Natural line and evaluated it for GMO risk. We hired experts because there are some ingredients, like certain spices and honey, where the risk for GMOs is not immediately obvious. Our investigation found that the vast majority of our natural products are GMO-free.

• Finally, there were a handful of products which did contain GMO ingredients. We committed to remove them and got right to work. Most have already been removed, and we aim to remove the remaining ingredients (in 3 products) by early 2014.

For more details and updates, visit our FAQ page here.