Food Labelling · Gluten

Tea’d Greens and Gluten: What Canadian Customers Should Know

Barley, wheat and oats immediately raise a reasonable question for anyone avoiding gluten. Tea’d Greens™ uses the young leaves of these cereal plants rather than mature grain—but harvest stage alone is not enough to support a gluten-free claim on a finished food.

Leaf and grain are different parts of the crop

Our production crop is harvested for young green leaves before it is allowed to mature into a conventional grain harvest. That distinction is relevant because the seed or grain is the part most people associate with cereal gluten.

However, a finished packaged food can also be exposed to gluten through cross-contact during growing, harvesting, transport, processing or packaging. That is why we do not treat “harvested before grain” as the entire answer.

What Canadian rules require

In Canada, a food represented as gluten-free must comply with section B.24.018 of the Food and Drug Regulations. Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency also use a 20 parts-per-million threshold in their current risk-management and enforcement approach for gluten that may be present through cross-contamination.

Manufacturers are expected to control cross-contamination and ensure a gluten-free claim is truthful and not misleading.

How we approach the question

Natural Farmworks grows and processes the young cereal leaves used in Tea’d Greens on our own farm. We manage the ingredient from field through on-farm processing, which gives us direct oversight of many points where contamination risks need to be considered.

When we represent a product as gluten-free, that representation should be supported by the current finished-product specifications, testing and production controls—not by a blanket statement that all young cereal leaves are automatically safe in every circumstance.

What customers with celiac disease should do

People with celiac disease or another medically diagnosed gluten-related disorder should rely on the current package labelling and up-to-date information from the manufacturer. If anything is unclear, contact us before consuming the product.

That is a more responsible answer than telling someone with celiac disease that harvest timing alone eliminates every possible risk.

Why we changed this article

An older version stated too absolutely that gluten “never forms” in the material used and suggested the infusion method itself provided another layer of protection. That was not the right basis for a food-safety claim. Gluten-free status needs to be assessed at the finished-product level under applicable Canadian requirements.