We are in the process of rewriting our "Certified Organic Seals" page. Because of this, the information on this page may be a bit disjointed for a few days. Please bear with us while we strive to imporve the information we provide.

Certified Organic Seals

There are many different certified organic seals around the world and each program has minor differences from the others. Here in the US we look mainly for the USDA Organic Seal. On the next few pages we'll provide links to many of the other programs.

There are many, many very excellent products which are not certified organic for one reason or another. Some examples would be:

Mineral Makeup/Cosmetics

Mineral based makeup and cosmetics as a rule have a high percentage, more than 5%, of mineral content. Minerals cannot be certified organic. Therefore no certification.

The big question then becomes, are the other ingredients organic products or toxic chemicals?

Many of these farmers have been priced out of the certified organic programs by the escalating costs associated with the certification inspections.

Even though they continue to raise their stock according to the USDA Organic guidelines, the narrow profit margins make it impossible for them to continue in the certification program.

When the USDA Organic program started in 2002, many small farms were forced to make a difficult choice: either pay high certification fees and complete mounds of paperwork to become "Certified Organic" or give up using the word "organic" to describe their produce and/or livestock.

Believing that neither choice was very attractive a group of farmers created Certified Naturally Grown to provide an alternative way to assure their customers that they observed strict growing practices. CNG now consists of more than 500 member farms in 47 states and growing.

One key in shopping for organic products is to find a certified organic seal. I would say that 99.99% of the time this will indicate that you are getting a product which meets the organic standards. I say 99.99% of the time because no certification process is totally without its faults.

In the US organic food will most likely have the USDA seal. Non-food products such as skin and body care products, baby products, cosmetics, clothes, linens and such may have one of any number of other certified organic seals.

The bottom line is that buying products with an organic seal will go a long way in helping to improve the quality of your food, skin care and personal care products and baby care products.

That being said, there are many companies that would like the average consumer to take their advertising at face value.

They're every where, words such as organics, natural, botanical, herbal, environmental, green or certified in the names of products or somewhere else on the label, but that does not make the product an organic product.

It seems that more and more companies are putting words and graphics on their labels in an effort to mislead consumers into believing that their products are organic and therefore, safe.

If there is no certified organic seal on the label of a product this should be a warning to look very closely at the ingredients before buying it.

So here, from around the world, are some of the major seals that you should be looking for:

The organization that assures organic integrity world wide is the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM).




The official United States government regulatory organization is the US Department of Agriculture.




An organization of small US organic farmers is the Certified Naturally Grown association.


The primary Australian organization is the Australian Certified Organic group.


The primary Australian organic farmers organization is the Biological Farmers of Australia.







The primary New Zealand organization is BioGro - New Zealand.



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