Hamburg, October 1999 - After months of silence the Aldi supermarket chain has now declared it will not use genetic modification in its own brand-name products. A letter from the company's head offices assures Greenpeace that its products do not contain genetically modified ingredients and that it wants to continue to ensure this will remain so.
Aldi is the third biggest retail company in Germany and one of the ten biggest food retailers in the world. Roughly 90 per cent of the goods it sells are own-brand. Aldi is following the example of the other big retail stores in Germany in the past few weeks. Edeka, Rewe, Metro, Tengelmann, Lidl and Spar havealready given assurances that their products are being made without the use of genetic modification. Together these seven companies control over three-quarters of the German food market.
'Genetically modified ingredients are coming up against a wall of rejection in the food trade,' says the genetic modification expert at Greenpeace, Christoph Then. 'Aldi's decision not to sell GM food has effects on the whole sector, because Aldi's quality standards are seen by many observers as yardsticks for all manufacturers. The German food trade's withdrawal from genetic modification is a hard blow for the genetic engineering industry and a great victory for consumers.'
