Consumers may be clamoring for organic and natural baked products, but meeting their needs isn't exactly as straightforward as it may seem.

Bakers who choose to go the organic, vegan or all natural route find the move isn't as easy as sourcing appropriate ingredients and packaging, says Dan Holtz, vice president and co-founder, Liz Lovely, Waitsfield, Vt., which produces vegan, organic and gluten-free cookies.

Bakers will need to evaluate each step of the process to determine just how organic, gluten-free or natural they'll want to be. These designations are not either/or stipulations. Although organic labeling is regulated, it exists along a continuum, as the USDA defines three levels of organics.

U.S. federal legislation dictates that products made entirely with certified organic ingredients and methods can be labeled “100 percent organic.” Products with at least 95 percent organic ingredients can use the word “organic.” Both of these categories may also display the USDA organic seal. A third category, for those products containing at least 70 percent organic ingredients, can be labeled “made with organic ingredients.” Baked products that contain fewer than 70 percent organic ingredients can't display the word organic on packaging, though bakers can list the organic ingredients in the ingredient statement.

Also, USDA rules dictate that a maker of spelt bagels and breads cannot label those products gluten free, though they can be marketed as an aid in a low gluten diet.

The move to organic and natural products itself comes with plenty of points to evaluate. Costs and sourcing challenges must be weighed against payoff in distribution and marketing gains, Holtz says.

How organic is organic?

At Liz Lovely, the challenge of creating an organic, vegan, and then a gluten-free baked product included finding appropriate suppliers, meeting certification requirements, and appropriating and denoting ingredients and percentages on packaging, Holtz says. He and his wife Liz founded the bakery six years ago to create an organic and vegan cookie that includes no butter, eggs or milk.

“The challenge we immediately found was we couldn't get ingredients in the right quantities,” Holtz says. They located ingredients that were either organic or vegan, but they had a hard time sourcing ingredients that met both requirements. When they found ingredients that were both vegan and organic, they couldn't source them at large enough quantities to bake at the wholesale level. Or, the quality of the ingredient didn't meet the bakery's standards.

Keeping up with production in the face of changes to ingredients can test a bakery's resourcefulness. For example, Liz Lovely's products were made with an organic butter alternative. But as the cookie company grew, the supplier couldn't keep up with the bakery's needs. After much experimentation, Liz Lovely eventually made the switch to organic palm fruit oil, which is non-hydrogenated.

Another reformulation came three years ago. The bakery had been producing vegan cookies. In 2007, its owners sought to add organic labeling to the product, which proved far more difficult than originally thought.

“We'd been using an egg replacement powder made up of starches. It was natural, but some ingredients were unacceptable in terms of organic certification,” Holtz says.

The question then became — as it does for many wholesale bakers looking to meet organic labeling requirements — what organic classification Liz Lovely would decide to meet and how far would its owners go to procure the organic label. To meet organic labeling standards, Liz Lovely would need to reformulate its line to do away with the egg-replacement powder.

“It was a technique thing,” Holtz says. “We played around with the mix times and the hold times and baking temperatures and the amount of water. We had to adjust the finer points of the way we do the formulas.”

Then, the payoff: the company's cookies became certified organic in 2007. The designation was quickly followed by an even larger payoff. With the organic certification, United Natural Foods, a large U.S. natural foods product distributor that supplies products to the likes of Whole Foods, could label Liz Lovely products as organic in its catalog.

“Your product isn't considered organic in their book unless it's 95 percent,” Holtz says. United Natural Foods will distribute products that do not meet the 95 percent organic cutoff, but they don't list it in their literature and catalog as organic. Many retailers pay attention to that distinction, he adds.

Ingredient sourcing challenges

The cookie bakery continues to move its vegan and gluten-free products toward the 95 percent organic category. The gluten-free cookies, for instance, meet the 70 percent organic labeling requirement.

“We're committed to 100 percent organic, but we don't want to box ourselves into a corner,” Holtz says. “At first we said, ‘We're not going to release anything that's not organic.’ Then when we got into the gluten-free area, we realized we didn't have that choice.”

“For instance, we still can't find the organic potato starch we'd like to use in significant enough quantities to make our cookies gluten-free and 95 percent organic,” Holtz adds.

Ensuring a continuous supply can also be a problem, adds Holtz, who has looked into why organic potato starch isn't available on a large scale. He says demand for the starch still isn't high enough, despite the amount of gluten-free bakery products now on store shelves and the fact that many of these products are made with organic potato starch.