GMO in the supermarket - what are they doing to help?

So having bought GMO Bacos in the supermarket, I thought it might be an idea to find out if any supermarkets wanted to help me avoid a repeat of the problem.


I wrote to The Co-Op, Morrisions, Waitrose, Ocado and Sainsburys we do also have 2 Tescos nearby, but, I will not shop there out of principle, Sainsburys don't normally get my custom, but as Morrisions is going to close with the advent of the third Tesco next door I am having to dig closer to the bottom of the barrell



Hi I recently accidentally purchased some GMO food, something I do not want to do. I can see that spotting GMO food is going to be really difficult to do. I am enquiring as to what you can/are doing to help me avoid doing this in your stores. There are a couple of ways I can see supermarkets help me. My first choice would be to use a supermarket that just doesn''t stock anything GMO. My second choice would be to have some Discreet but clear labelling of GMO foods in store, perhaps a red dot on the shelf ticket that only means something to those who know. The option of last resort is to have a list of products.

The results came back, apart from Ocado and they all said just about the same identical thing.

"None of our own brand products contain GMO", but we can't vouch for our suppliers.

In practice this means that they are not prepared to forgo the profits that they make from GMO products by de listing products containing GMO or are being bullied into stocking them by suppliers who will not allow them to selectively accept products.

Bottom line "it stinks" there would be publicity to be earned if a supermarket was to "turn it's back" on GMO clearly this would not be enough to offset the costs or losses in profits that would follow on.

GMO is profitable and here to stay, we as consumers are tasked with reading the small print and checking every product we buy. Our only recourse is to not buy or better still, return the product to the store, perhaps if they get enough returns, the economics might changes.