Lake Champlain Chocolates nixing GMOs

Within the next month, Lake Champlain Chocolates will have transformed its sweets to versions that are free of genetically modified ingredients, said sales director Allyson Myers.

"Going back about two years we saw this increasing desire from consumers to know where their food came from," Myers said.

That made the Burlington-based chocolatier examine more closely at where its ingredients came from. Now, all of the company's base products are Fair Trade certified, she said, even though the company has yet to brag about it on packaging.

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Making sure they are free of genetically modified organisms has proven more complicated, she said. The corn syrup and soy lecithin that go into candy were relatively simple, as the company switched to organic rice syrup and to an organic soy.

The nuts were more of a surprise, she said. Some of those the company used were roasted in genetically modified cottonseed oil. Those were switched to a peanut oil, without any discernible change in flavor, she said, but that switch introduced a new allergen the company had to warn consumers about.

"A journey is the best way to describe it," Myers said of the year-long process of going non-GMO. The last products in Lake Champlain Chocolates' line should be non-GMO within a month or so, she said.

The next step for Lake Champlain Chocolates is to win verification from the Non-GMO Project. That will require attention to dairy products, including using organic butter and milk that can be in short supply, Myers said. The Non-GMO Project considers dairy to be genetically modified if the animals are fed GMO corn. That's in contrast to Vermont and other countries' labeling laws, which exempt dairy.