Organico shop now has organic certification? Yes, it’s true – shops now need to be certified by an official certification body. If we want to sell loose organic vegetables, that is. And don’t want to be taken to court by the Department of Agriculture. Or don’t want to sell our lovely organic veg in plastic packaging, which is the only alternative to certification.
In Organico we sell lots of organic fruit and veg loose, which we buy from certified organic suppliers. And we are very careful about how we source our fruit and veg, because we feel passionately that fresh organic fruit and veg should be affordable and available to everyone. And we use it in our cafe too, so we would want to be getting the best quality. But until this summer we had no idea that we were technically ‘breaking’ Irish law.
Becoming certified (we chose to join the Irish Organic Trust) was actually very easy, because we were already doing most of the things they want us to do. To keep our certificate we need to do a bit of paper work and we need to keep in good contact with the Organic Trust. And they will visit us every year, and next year we hope to obtain Organic Certification for our Bakery.
All this is good – we are very happy to be working with the Trust and to be improving our service to our customers. What I think is very wrong is that many shops would be very put off by the way the Inspectors from the Department came in to our shop and started telling us how ‘bad’ we were. When actually, we were only breaking the letter of the law, and their job is to inform us of the law, which they had never done. And their attitude was such that we felt harassed, when their job should be supporting retailers selling organic produce, not terrifying them so much that they give up, or even worse, start to sell their vegetables in plastic packages like supermarkets do.
If you want more information on this topic, or if you have a shop and want to become a certified organic retailer of fruit and veg like Organico, please contact me (Hannah Dare) at info@organico.ie or the Organic Trust, and beware of the Department of Agriculture Inspectors!