Are Whole Foods' vegan things really vegan?!

Best Answer - Chosen by Voters

Yes. The best foods are whole foods.
SDA

Real brown sugar is vegan. White sugar is sometimes processed with bone char to make it white. Brown sugar does not get whitened and therefore never contacts bone char.

The issue is that cheap, supermarket brand "brown sugar" sometimes is not brown sugar at all, but white sugar mixed with molasses, and therefore is possibly not vegan. The front of the package may say "brown sugar," but the ingredients will be white sugar and molasses, as opposed to just brown sugar, so as long as you read the ingredients you know what you're buying.

So anyway, if the whole foods package says "brown sugar" and claims to be vegan, it is.

What about those ingredients that sound like they are from milk, such as lactic acid, lactose, and lactate?
If it's lactate or lactic acid, it's not from dairy (exception - sterol lactate due to the stearic acid). "Lac" ingredients are usually produced by a fermentation process using cornstarch or beet sugar. Lactose is always from dairy. Most ingredients made with with calcium are vegan (i.e. calcium carbonate, calcium phosphate, calcium sulfate). The exceptions are calcium caseinate and calcium stearate. Drink up the calcium fortified o.j. - it's vegan!
http://www.vrg.org/nutshell/faqingredien…

Don't worry about vegan items from Whole Foods. They actually know what a vegan is.

vegan

Some sugar is processed through bone char, but some is not. It may be either evaporated cane juice or a type of sugar that is not filtered through bone char.. .

Lactic acid can come from plant or dairy sources, and products marketed toward vegans will make clear that it's from plant sources. LactOSE, on the other hand, is always dairy.

If it's labeled as vegan, as in certified vegan, then you don't need to worry, you just need to eat it. And yeah, I would trust the manufacturer to tell me whether it is or is not vegan. If they lie, and I have an allergic reaction, I can sue. But most people out there who label food as vegan don't do it as an act of malice and feed us meat and dairy.

That's hilarious. You won't take the word of the manufacturer as to whether it is vegan or not - but you'll take the word of a bunch of kids on the Internet.

You don't even give details as to what it is you bought -you just say you got "something" from WF. How do you expect people to give you any kind of answer approaching accurate if you don't even say what the brand and product is??????

Great decision making skills you have there. Mom must be proud.

Ask better questions = get better answers.

Not all sugar is processed with bone char, and not all lactic acid comes from animals sources. If it is merely labeled as vegan, you may want to call about the sugar. It's it's certified vegan by Vegan Action, you don't have to worry about it.