Last Updated on August 25, 2023 by higherring
Hanging out on the farm you hear a lot of gossip.
So, a few years ago, like four years ago, a major company decided that they were going to get into the gluten-free oat market. I don’t know the name of the company, and they ended up getting out, so don’t worry about that, but they undercut everybody on prices, making it really hard for people who had been doing gluten-free oats for a long time to compete.
Low and behold, it was discovered that the reason they were able to do such inexpensive gluten-free oats, is that the oats were not actually gluten free. They were selling oats that were labeled gluten-free that were not actually gluten free!
This is the kind of thing we could catch if we had a lot more transparency, and people were demanding that and expecting it. I would say that anyone who needs something like gluten-free oats or allergy free anything, you’ve got to be super, super careful about the new brands that come into the market. Most of them are 100% honest and trying to do the right thing but you do get some people who are trying to game the system because they know that they can charge more to people like us, who do need special dietary food.
Written by Colleen Kavanagh, Founder of A Better Course and ZEGO LLC, July 29, 2022.
Colleen Kavanagh
Colleen has dedicated over 20 years of her career to improving the federal nutrition programs on the local, state, and federal level in her work for Congress, the School Nutrition Association, California Food Policy Advocates, and her own nonprofit project called A Better Course. Frustrated with the inability of federal action to bring truly healthy food to those in need. she started her food company ZEGO in 2013 to focus on food purity and nutrition density. Through ZEGO, she encourages consumers to advocate for themselves and ask the brands they love to measure and report the purity of their food.