Is two weeks too long to wait for a reply from a company on a GF question?

Two weeks ago, I sent info to GoodBelly to inquire if their products are gluten free.  They are labeled as wheat free, but wheat free does not always mean gluten free.

It took them two weeks to get back to me, and I have to say, that’s unacceptable.

Considering that there is barley malt and that the malt is “consumed by the live and active probiotic cultures throughout their life cycle, and ultimately eliminated as a detectable source of gluten as the probiotics process it” makes me shun the drink anyhow.

Here’s their response.   What do you think is a timely response for companies to get back to consumers regarding if their products are gluten free or not?  I told them that even if I had received an email along the lines of “Hey, we got your email and are looking into it and will get back to you” – I’d be fine.  But nothing.

Dear Steve,

Thank you for reaching out to us at GoodBelly.  In order to explain why we label GoodBelly the way we do, I thought I would give you a bit of the background information about our formulation.  We use oat flour as the basis for growing our probiotic culture. The oat we source is consistently tested for wheat cross-contamination, selecting only those lots which meet our standards, since we do make a ‘wheat free’ claim.  We also use a small amount of barley malt that assists the oats in the culturing process. This malt is consumed by the live and active probiotic cultures throughout their life cycle, and ultimately eliminated as a detectable source of gluten as the probiotics process it, which is likely the reason that many on a gluten-free diet are entirely fine consuming GoodBelly and experience only the benefits of the probiotics, not any adverse effects of gluten.

GoodBelly’s quality assurance team tests our finished products on a regular basis for gluten at a detection limit of 5 ppm, and do not identify gluten at that level.  As I am sure you know, the legal limit for a gluten-free claim is 20 ppm.  However, we have chosen not to mark our products with a gluten-free label at this time and chosen instead to inform our customers about our ingredients content so they can make educated decisions in regards to their individual gluten tolerance levels.

We do get requests regularly from people like you who are looking for an entirely gluten-free product (no exceptions), and are pursuing whether this might be an option in the future.  Please check back in a few months and we will keep you informed, as we would love to have an option for you. If you would like to see GoodBelly products’ nutritional facts and ingredients panels, feel free to click here for more information… about halfway down the page you will see links to this information for all GoodBelly products.

I hope this information is useful to you.   Please let me know if I can provide you with any additional information.