German shoppers paid out around €12.6bn on products with the "Ohne GenTechnik" (non-GMO) label in 2020, said VLOG, the organization behind the seal.
The market share of such products in terms of food retail in Germany is now around 5.4%, it added.
Non-GMO milk and dairy products accounted for the largest share of that consumer spend, with shoppers buying €8.8bn worth of those items; those purchases represented 70% of total non-GMO food sales last year.
Poultry meat products accounted for €2.2bn or 17% of non-GMO food purchases in 2020, non-GMO egg sales hit the €1.1bn mark or 9% of all non-GMO food products bought; other non-GMO products, including pork and fish products, accounted for €0.5bn or 4% of total sales.
Those figures are based on information provided by the licensees of the "Ohne GenTechnik" label plus a flat trade margin and VAT. Based on the forecasts of the current licensees alone, VLOG expects the sales of non-GMO food products to increase by at least another 3.5% over the course of 2021
The German Association for Food without Genetic Engineering (VLOG), the organization behind the Ohne GenTechnik label, represents about 750 food producers and traders. It issues licenses for that seal for food produced without genetic engineering. The product database now contains over 15,500 entries.
There are well over 1,000 feed related companies based in Germany but also in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium, certified against the VLOG standard today. They can be feed producers, logistic companies or mixers and grinders.
VLOG has produced a document outlining the most frequent questions about the conventions under the Ohne GenTechnik label, delivering responses to all those queries.
Regulation
"In the last ten years, in Germany, non-GMO products have gained a firm place on grocery shelves and in shopping baskets. Consumers highly value the absence GMOs in food products. By this, they explicitly also mean GMOs from [new plant breeding] methods such as CRISPR, as recent surveys show," said VLOG executive director, Alexander Hissting.
With regard to the announced EU Commission study on the regulation of new GMOs, he warned: "For consumers, the agricultural and food sector and retailers, it is therefore essential that [plants produced by] gene editing, CRISPR and the like continue to be considered GMOs in the EU without exception. Otherwise, there would no longer be any transparency and labelling would become almost impossible.”
