Label Mine Organic’and Local
Local. Natural. Non-GMO. Organic. What’s a consumer to choose?
In 2011, we wrote an article exposing the then-popular trend in food marketing’promoting ‘local’ foods as ‘sustainable,’ ‘healthy’ or ‘natural.’
As we said then, ‘local’ often means nothing more than food that has been sourced from within a prescribed geographic area. But because a growing number of conscientious consumers actively seek out the ‘local’ label’and are willing to pay a premium for it’corporations routinely co-opt the term so they can sell more product, at higher prices, in order to increase profit margins by promising (but not actually delivering) added value.
Fast-forward a couple of years, and we see that sales of ‘local’ food are still on the rise, as are sales of ‘natural’ and more recently, ‘Non-GMO’ foods. And today, just as they were a few years ago, consumers are still being duped by corporations that use these labels to pass off products as something they aren’t.