As Harvest Market enters its 27th year as Hockessin’s Community Grocer, we are pleased to introduce you to our own line of high-quality nutritional supplements. After more than a year of groundwork and research we have decided to use Vitamer Labs as our manufacturing partner. Vitamer has been formulating and supplying natural supplements to health care practitioners and independently-owned markets since 1975. Vitamer is a division of New Generation Wellness–a fourth-generation, family-owned company that began encapsulating dehydrated food powders as nutritional supplements in 1925. Though food itself is always our best medicine, nutritional supplements can be an important add-on in anyone’s quest to help optimize wellness.
More than 100 different products are included in our opening set of Harvest Market brand supplements. These are produced in Vitamer’s two manufacturing facilities comprising 350,000 square feet—both of which are regularly inspected by the FDA as well as certified for Good Manufacturing Practices by the Natural Products Association. Each facility also has its own state-of-the-art, quality assurance lab that tests each lot of raw materials as well as each finished product for identity, potency and non-organic and microbial contamination. Some products are also tested by third-party labs. Products that do not pass all tests are destroyed.
Additionally, the overwhelming majority of our line is both certified no-GMO and double-certified as gluten-free. No-GMO means no genetically modified crop ingredients are included in the products. This is important for example, since the majority of common vitamin C (ascorbic acid) on the market is derived from fermented GMO corn, and the majority of even “natural” vitamin E is derived from GMO soybeans. Certified gluten-free means that all products are tested to be “non-detect” at 10 parts per million—half the amount allowed by the FDA (20 ppm) to be legally labeled as gluten-free. Look for the No-GMO and Gluten-Free seals on the front of the label. Our labels are also full disclosure to both all ingredients and all possible allergens.
Harvest Market’s new supplement line is packaged in recyclable, amber glass bottles (great!) with recyclable plastic lids. We would have preferred metal lids like the ones on the Solgar line, but they are not an option at this time. We believe these products are an excellent addition to the thousands of name-brand supplements we have always carried. We are also looking forward to expand the line in the months and years ahead as new formulas and varieties are developed.
