Only 14 plant crops and a handful of animals are genetically modified and approved for sale in the United States. That number sounds small, but those few crops, especially corn, soybeans, and sugar beets, end up as ingredients in a huge share of packaged foods. The gap between “how many crops are GMO” and “how many products contain GMO ingredients” is where most of the confusion lies.
The Full List of GMO Crops
The USDA maintains an official List of Bioengineered Foods. As of now, it includes these 14 crops:
- Alfalfa
- Apple (Arctic varieties, engineered not to brown)
- Canola
- Corn
- Cotton
- Eggplant (BARI Bt Begun varieties, grown in Bangladesh)
- Papaya (ringspot virus-resistant varieties)
- Pineapple (pink-flesh varieties)
- Potato (engineered to resist bruising and browning)
- Salmon (AquAdvantage, engineered to grow faster)
- Soybean
- Squash (certain summer varieties resistant to viruses)
- Sugar beet
- Sugarcane (insect-resistant varieties)
That’s it. No GMO wheat, rice, tomatoes, strawberries, or chicken exists in any grocery store, despite what you might assume. Wheat is one of the most common sources of confusion: it has never been approved for commercial GMO production in the United States.
Why So Few Crops Affect So Many Products
Three crops dominate GMO acreage: corn, soybeans, and cotton. In 2020, 92% of all corn planted in the U.S. was genetically modified, along with 94% of soybeans and 96% of cotton. Sugar beets round out the group, with more than half the granulated sugar on grocery shelves coming from GMO beets.
These crops are the backbone of the processed food supply. Corn alone becomes cornstarch, corn syrup, corn oil, dextrose, and dozens of other additives. Soybeans become soybean oil, lecithin, and protein isolates. Canola becomes canola oil. Cotton becomes cottonseed oil. If a packaged food contains any of those ingredients and isn’t specifically labeled non-GMO, it almost certainly traces back to genetically modified crops. The FDA puts it bluntly: it is very likely you are eating foods made with ingredients from GMO crops.
So while only 14 crops are on the list, their derivatives show up in everything from bread and salad dressing to soda, cereal, and snack bars. One estimate commonly cited in the food industry puts the share of processed grocery products containing at least one GMO-derived ingredient at around 75%.
GMO Animals on the Market
The animal side is far smaller. Only two genetically modified animals have been FDA-approved for human consumption. AquAdvantage salmon, an Atlantic salmon engineered to grow to market size roughly twice as fast as conventional salmon, was approved in 2015. And in 2022, the FDA approved a line of beef cattle edited with CRISPR to have short, slick hair, making them more heat-tolerant for warmer climates.
A third animal, the GalSafe pig, is close to approval. Pigs edited to resist a devastating respiratory disease called PRRS have already been approved in Brazil and Colombia, and researchers are seeking U.S. approval. But for now, the only GMO animal protein you could realistically encounter in a store is the salmon.
Specialty Produce You Can Actually Buy
Most GMO crops are commodity ingredients you never see in their whole form. But a few genetically modified fruits and vegetables do sit in the produce aisle. Arctic apples, available in Golden, Granny, and Fuji varieties, are engineered so the flesh doesn’t turn brown after you cut them. Innate potatoes resist bruising during transport and produce less of a potentially harmful compound when fried at high temperatures. Pink-flesh pineapples, sold by Del Monte under the Pinkglow brand, contain lycopene, the same antioxidant that gives tomatoes their red color.
Hawaiian papaya has been genetically modified since the late 1990s to survive ringspot virus, which nearly wiped out the Hawaiian papaya industry. Some summer squash varieties, particularly certain zucchini, carry genes that help them resist common plant viruses. A small amount of sweet corn sold fresh is also genetically modified, though it represents a tiny fraction of the sweet corn market.
How GMO Labeling Works
Since 2022, the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard has required food manufacturers to label products that contain detectable modified genetic material. You’ll see this as text (“bioengineered food ingredient”), the USDA’s green bioengineered symbol, or a QR code linking to more information.
There are important limits to what this label catches. If the manufacturing process breaks down the modified DNA so it’s no longer detectable, no label is required. That means highly refined ingredients like corn syrup, soybean oil, and beet sugar often escape disclosure, even though they originate from GMO crops. There’s also a 5% threshold: if an ingredient contains less than 5% bioengineered material, it can be counted as inadvertent or technically unavoidable, and no disclosure is needed.
Very small food manufacturers are exempt from the rule entirely. So the absence of a bioengineered label doesn’t guarantee a product is GMO-free. If avoiding GMO-derived ingredients matters to you, the USDA Organic seal or the Non-GMO Project’s butterfly label are more reliable indicators, since both require verification beyond just testing for detectable DNA.
What’s Not GMO (Despite Common Belief)
The short list of actual GMO crops means most whole fruits, vegetables, grains, and proteins in the grocery store have no genetically modified version. Tomatoes, strawberries, bananas, wheat, rice, oats, chicken, beef (aside from the one CRISPR-edited cattle line), pork, and eggs are all conventional. “Non-GMO” labels on foods like orange juice, pasta, or fresh chicken are technically accurate but can be misleading, since no GMO version of those products exists in the first place.
The distinction that matters most for everyday shopping: the produce section is overwhelmingly non-GMO, with just a few exceptions. The center aisles of the grocery store, where processed and packaged foods live, are where GMO-derived ingredients concentrate, carried by corn, soy, sugar beets, and canola into an enormous range of products.