Lifestyle: How to Feel Confident About What You Are Eating

January 22, 2017

Epermarket is one of our IPWS annual sponsors, and this month as we push through wintertime, we all think it’s time to reflect on healthy eating for professional women, and why we should consider the fuel we’re running on in our busy professional lives. IPWS is about educating & informing professional women in Shanghai, so every so often you’ll see something from our sponsors to support your lifestyle in this vibrant busy city.

We all know that healthy eating is one of the keys to a giving ourselves a better quality of life, and a major decision that we need to make when we commit to healthy eating is whether or not to make the switch to organic. But one of the challenges of organic living in China is how confident you are in whether the produce you’re buying is actually organic or not.

Over the last few years, the Chinese government has made a large effort to regulate organic farms all over China and has established strict regulations for how they operate to ensure the products that they produce are truly in accordance to international organic standards. It’s not a simple process to obtain and maintain organic status either: there are about 250 different standards that organic farms need to meet in order to even be considered for organic certification and must go through recertification every year.

To ensure that consumers can be confident whether their produce is truly organic or not, every item produced by certified farms must be labeled with a unique sticker with a QR code that is only issued by the government. When scanned, the QR code will pull up details about the product, such as the farm it was grown on as well as their certifications and contact information.

But just because organics are available in China doesn’t mean everything we want is available. In order to provide organic vegetables and fresh herbs that are difficult to find in China, Epermarket also proudly runs their own organic farm, Eperfarm, which strives for sustainable crop production that grows food in an ecologically and ethically responsible manner.

Eperfarm is certified by the OFDC every year, the leading and most respected Organic Certification in China, and constantly works in strict accordance with the international standards and regulations of IFOAM (International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movement), while providing fair treatment to workers and supporting Eperfarm’s local community in Jiading District (Shanghai).

All organic produce offered on Epermarket are not only available according to their seasonality, but are grown using the following criteria:

Filtered Water – First the water is distilled, then it is put through additional filtering, leaving behind pollutants
Clean & Healthy Soil – Constant soil testing, intercropping and crop rotation ensures that the soil nutrient level is always optimized
No Chemical Pesticides & Fertilizers – Only all natural compost and non-chemical pest control methods are used
No GMOs – all seed production is carefully isolated away from any possible GMO crops and all relevant seeds are tested for GMOs.

What’s In Season Right Now for Organics: Kale, Carrots, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Bok Choy and Green Cabbage!

Epermarket is your online expat supermarket, where you can find the products and brands you miss from a place you trust. ISO 9001 certified, they also test their fresh products with SGS, and run their own organic farm, Eperfarm. You can select from over 7,000 products from around the world at diverse price ranges to be delivered directly to your doorstep.