Your Health

How We Trace Thousands of Ingredients Right Back to the Seed

What Traceability Means to Us

Extraordinary health starts with extraordinary ingredients – and that’s why we put traceability before profit, every single time. After all, we’re fanatical about sourcing only the cleanest whole foods, so it makes sense to be just as passionate about tracing each and every one of our ingredients right back to the soil from which it grew.

 

But tracing thousands of whole food ingredients back to the seed is no easy task. Just one formula could have over 100 ingredients from 100 different suppliers. And, at Garden of Life, we have over 150 formulas! So here’s a look into how we ensure full transparency and traceability – and why it’s so essential for empowering extraordinary health.

 

We can trace all of our steps

 

Many Garden of Life products meet USDA Organic and Non-GMO certified standards, and that’s because they’re fully traceable. Only by knowing every detail of a particular ingredient’s supply chain can we verify with confidence that it satisfies the rigorous standards of third-part verification. And it’s by going to these lengths that we can proudly say that understand the entirety of a product’s journey, all the way from the seed to the shelf.

 

Just one formula could have over 100 ingredients from 100 different suppliers. And we have over 150 formulas

 

By using the finest organic whole food ingredients, we make clean living easier – and you’ll know you’re doing the environment plenty of good at the same time.

 

The Garden of Life family

 

At Garden of Life, we work with a network of approved farmers across the US, Canada, and Europe, who provide us with many of our organic ingredients, including vegetables and seeds that are later turned into extracts to add to our products.

 

This means we have full visibility over all of our ingredients, and can even pinpoint how the workers involved in the process are paid and treated

 

As Dawn Thorpe Jarvis, our Senior Director of Nutritional Science, explains: “We source our ingredients from food, but we actually go to the farm and find out where those ingredients come from. We know our farmers and everything about the soil…to ensure we have complete traceability on everything that goes into the product”.

 

This means we have full visibility over all of our ingredients. We can pinpoint exactly which patch of ground they were grown in, the practices used to farm them, and even how the workers involved in the process are paid and treated.

 

We’re firm believers that the best ingredients need time to grow, and that can involve waiting for just the right amounts of sunlight and rain. It takes longer, but it’s worth it.

 

We get third party organisations to inspect our products to verify that they are clean, natural and organic, and we’re particularly proud that our Organics vitamins range features only ingredients that meet USDA Organic and Non-GMO standards.

 

What is USDA Organic certification?

 

USDA Organic-certified ingredients are those grown without the use of any synthetic pesticides, sewage sludge, ionising radiation or any genetically modified organisms.

 

What are Non-GMO standards?

 

We’re incredibly proud that so many Garden of Life products meet Non-GMO standards, as this means we’ve officially proven that they’re free from genetically modified organisms. Traceability and sampling techniques are also assessed by the body, and we’re delighted to have their certification.

 

Why traceability is at our heart

 

We pour a huge amount of time and care into our products, and we believe that’s the same amount of love you should be giving your body.

 

The Garden of Life way is all about looking after the world around us, and our commitment to traceability helps us to support small organic farmers, use the natural resources available to us, and make following a clean, plant-based lifestyle easy.

 

There are so many health benefits to this way of living for everything from your digestive system to your skin, and our passion for traceability means you can be sure you’re putting only the very best clean ingredients in your body.

 

Our processes might take that little bit longer, but we think more things in life should follow suit; slowing the pace down, doing things by hand, and taking in plenty of natural nutrients, natural light and water – that sounds like the good life to us.

 

Explore our fully traceable collection of multivitamins, microbiomes and vegan protein today.



Garden of Life

Garden of Life

Writer and expert