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Health & Saf. Code, § 110815 · Article 7. The California Organic Food and Farming Act

Health & Saf. Code, § 110815

Verbatim from the official edition

Text — As published in the Legislative Counsel's database, tables dated October 18, 2026 (pubinfo_2025.zip)

Unless otherwise defined pursuant to the National Organic Program, the following words and phrases, when used in this article, shall have the following meanings:

(a) “Animal food” means any food intended to be fed to any household animal, including, but not limited to, cats, or dogs and other carnivores. It does not include “feed” intended for livestock as defined in Section 205.2 of Title 7 of the Code of Federal Regulations.

(b) “Director” means the Director of the Department of Health Services.

(c) “Enforcement authority” means the governmental unit with primary enforcement jurisdiction, as provided in Section 110930.

(d) “Handle” means to sell, process, or package agricultural products.

(e) “Handler” means any person engaged in the business of handling agricultural products, but does not include final retailers of agricultural products that do not process agricultural products.

(f) “Handling operation” means any operation or portion of an operation, except final retailers of agricultural products that do not process agricultural products, that (1) receives or otherwise acquires agricultural products and (2) processes, packages, or stores agricultural products.

(g) “NOP” means the National Organic Program established pursuant to the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 (7 U.S.C. Sec. 6501 et seq.) and the regulations adopted for implementation.

(h) “Processing” means cooking, baking, heating, drying, mixing, grinding, churning, separating, extracting, cutting, fermenting, eviscerating, preserving, dehydrating, freezing, or otherwise manufacturing, and includes packaging, canning, jarring, or otherwise enclosing food in a container.

(i) “Prohibited materials” means any materials prohibited under regulations adopted by (Section 6517 of the federal Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 (7 U.S.C. Sec. 6501 et seq.)). For products not covered by the National Organic Program, prohibited materials are anything not on the approved list.

(j) “Secretary” means the Secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture.

(k) “Sold as organic” means any use of the terms “organic,” “organically grown,” or grammatical variations of those terms, whether orally or in writing, in connection with any product grown, handled, processed, sold, or offered for sale in this state, including, but not limited to, any use of these terms in labeling or advertising of any product and any ingredient in a multi-ingredient product.

( l) “USDA” means the United States Department of Agriculture.

Notes and commentary — not statutory text

History

Amended by Stats. 2003, Ch. 726, Sec. 6. Effective January 1, 2004.

Source of truth

Edition
As published in the Legislative Counsel's database, tables dated October 18, 2026 (pubinfo_2025.zip)
Official file
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=HSC&sectionNum=110815.
Text hash
sha256 0ecfad5b9cc4946645508a113c50795f9a382b7d5ec6d4110e483eebadf6784d
Composed by
compose_ca.py 2026-10-22: the Legislative Counsel's CAML content files read by a tokenizer (caml_readers.reader_a); an independent xml.etree reading (caml_readers.reader_b) agrees on every section

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