Quality Standards
From our industry-leading standards for sustainable wild-caught seafood and Global Animal Partnership Animal Welfare Certified meat, to our ever-growing list of food ingredients we ban, we take pride in what we do sell and even more in what we don’t. Most important of all, we’re pushing to make those standards higher and higher every day.
Before they go in your cart, they go through us.
Explore Our Standards
All seafood in the Seafood department is Responsibly Farmed or sustainable wild-caught.
Our wild-caught seafood is certified or rated for sustainability, and our farmed seafood is third-party verified Responsibly Farmed.
In our Meat department, you’ll find 100+ animal welfare standards for fresh beef, pork, chicken and more.
Our meat is traceable to farm or ranch. No antibiotics, ever, and no added growth hormones. Because better meat is our commitment to you.
Banning 260+ food ingredients storewide is a good standard to live by.
What we sell is as important as what we don’t. That's why our standards prohibit over 260 preservatives, flavors, colors, sweeteners and other ingredients from all food we sell. Even better, our banned list continues to grow.
Our standard for eggs: beyond cage-free.
All the eggs in our dairy case are better than cage-free. They have to meet our Animal Welfare Standards — because when chickens behave naturally, they naturally lay great eggs.
Clean standards mean we’re cleaning up cleaners.
Some ingredients just don’t belong in household cleaners. So far, we’ve banned 135+ of them — so you enjoy products you can trust. And they’re all performance-tested, too.
What goes on your body is as important as what goes in it.
You don’t have to worry about ingredients like parabens, phthalates and oxybenzone in our beauty and body care products. We’ve banned 215+ ingredients and counting.

Why we’re the first and only certified organic national grocer.
From our organic grocer certification to stocking 22,000 organic products and counting across our stores, we go above and beyond the average retailer.
Supplements have standards? Ours do.
In our aisles you’ll find high-quality supplements without 140+ preservatives, flavors, colors and other ingredients.

Sourced for Good: Products that taste good — and do good.
Created by Whole Foods Market, our Sourced for Good program helps support workers, communities and environmental stewardship where our products are sourced.
Upsetting the applecart since 1980.
For 40+ years, we’ve championed better ingredients like nobody’s business. Check out the milestones of how we’ve been pioneering industry-leading standards since day one.