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Battle of the Organics and Locals: WalMart vs. Whole Foods
I posted this on Politics and Current Events, and there was a request I repost it here...
I'd love to hear your thoughts...
One thing: I'm fully aware of the plight of workers who work for WalMart, and the article conspicuously stays away from any workers' issues at all... the video accompanying the article at the Atlantic says that they haven't researched worker issues regarding people who work for the farms that sell to WM or WF...
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Will Walmart, not Whole Foods, save the small farm and make America healthy?
by Corby Kummer
The Great Grocery Smackdown
Image credit: Eli Meir Kaplan
Buy my food at Walmart? No thanks. Until recently, I had been to exactly one Walmart in my life, at the insistence of a friend I was visiting in Natchez, Mississippi, about 10 years ago. It was one of the sights, she said. Up and down the aisles we went, properly impressed by the endless rows and endless abundance. Not the produce section. I saw rows of prepackaged, plastic-trapped fruits and vegetables. I would never think of shopping there.
Not even if I could get environmentally correct food. Walmart?s move into organics was then getting under way, but it just seemed cynical?a way to grab market share while driving small stores and farmers out of business. Then, last year, the market for organic milk started to go down along with the economy, and dairy farmers in Vermont and other states, who had made big investments in organic certification, began losing contracts and selling their farms. A guaranteed large buyer of organic milk began to look more attractive. And friends started telling me I needed to look seriously at Walmart?s efforts to sell sustainably raised food.
Really? Wasn?t this greenwashing? I called Charles Fishman, the author of The Wal-Mart Effect, which entertainingly documents the market-changing (and company-destroying) effects of Walmart's decisions. He reiterated that whatever Walmart decides to do has large repercussions?and told me that what it had decided to do since my Natchez foray was to compete with high-end supermarkets. ?You won?t recognize the grocery section of a supercenter,? he said. He ordered me to get in my car and find one.
He was right. In the grocery section of the Raynham supercenter, 45 minutes south of Boston, I had trouble believing I was in a Walmart. The very reasonable-looking produce, most of it loose and nicely organized, was in black plastic bins (as in British supermarkets, where the look is common; the idea is to make the colors pop). The first thing I saw, McIntosh apples, came from the same local orchard whose apples I?d just seen in the same bags at Whole Foods. The bunched beets were from Muranaka Farm, whose beets I often buy at other markets?but these looked much fresher. The service people I could find (it wasn?t hard) were unfailingly enthusiastic, though I did wonder whether they got let out at night.
During a few days of tasting, the results were mixed. Those beets handily beat (sorry) ones I?d just bought at Whole Foods, and compared nicely with beets I?d recently bought at the farmers? market. But packaged carrots and celery, both organic, were flavorless. Organic bananas and ?tree ripened? California peaches, already out of season, were better than the ones in most supermarkets, and most of the Walmart food was cheaper?though when I went to my usual Whole Foods to compare prices for local produce, they were surprisingly similar (dry goods and dairy products were considerably less expensive at Walmart).
Walmart holding its own against Whole Foods? This called for a blind tasting.
I conspired with my contrarian friend James McWilliams, an agricultural historian at Texas State University at San Marcos and the author of the new Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly. He enlisted his friends at Fino, a restaurant in Austin that pays special attention to where the food it serves comes from, as co-conspirators. I would buy two complete sets of ingredients, one at Walmart and the other at Whole Foods. The chef would prepare them as simply as possible, and serve two versions of each course, side by side on the same plate, to a group of local food experts invited to judge.
I started looking into how and why Walmart could be plausibly competing with Whole Foods, and found that its produce-buying had evolved beyond organics, to a virtually unknown program?one that could do more to encourage small and medium-size American farms than any number of well-meaning nonprofits, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with its new Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food campaign. Not even Fishman, who has been closely tracking Walmart?s sustainability efforts, had heard of it. ?They do a lot of good things they don?t talk about,? he offered.
The program, which Walmart calls Heritage Agriculture, will encourage farms within a day?s drive of one of its warehouses to grow crops that now take days to arrive in trucks from states like Florida and California. In many cases the crops once flourished in the places where Walmart is encouraging their revival, but vanished because of Big Agriculture competition.
Ron McCormick, the senior director of local and sustainable sourcing for Walmart, told me that about three years ago he came upon pictures from the 1920s of thriving apple orchards in Rogers, Arkansas, eight miles from the company?s headquarters. Apples were once shipped from northwest Arkansas by railroad to St. Louis and Chicago. After Washington state and California took over the apple market, hardly any orchards remained. Cabbage, greens, and melons were also once staples of the local farming economy. But for decades, Arkansas?s cash crops have been tomatoes and grapes. A new initiative could diversify crops and give consumers fresher produce.
As with most Walmart programs, the clear impetus is to claim a share of consumer spending: first for organics, now for locally grown food. But buying local food is often harder than buying organic. The obstacles for both small farm and big store are many: how much a relatively small farmer can grow and how reliably, given short growing seasons; how to charge a competitive price when the farmer?s expenses are so much higher than those of industrial farms; and how to get produce from farm to warehouse.
Walmart knows all this, and knows that various nonprofit agricultural and university networks are trying to solve the same problems. In considering how to build on existing programs (and investments), Walmart talked with the local branch of the Environmental Defense Fund, which opened near the company?s Arkansas headquarters when Walmart started to look serious about green efforts, and with the Applied Sustainability Center at the University of Arkansas. The center (of which the Walmart Foundation is a chief funder) is part of a national partnership called Agile Agriculture, which includes universities such as Drake and the University of New Hampshire and nonprofits like the American Farmland Trust.* To get more locally grown produce into grocery stores and restaurants, the partnership is centralizing and streamlining distribution for farms with limited growing seasons, limited production, and limited transportation resources.
Walmart says it wants to revive local economies and communities that lost out when agriculture became centralized in large states. (The heirloom varieties beloved by foodies lost out at the same time, but so far they?re not a focus of Walmart?s program.) This would be something like bringing the once-flourishing silk and wool trades back to my hometown of Rockville, Connecticut. It?s not something you expect from Walmart, which is better known for destroying local economies than for rebuilding them.
As everyone who sells to or buys from (or, notoriously, works for) Walmart knows, price is where every consideration begins and ends. Even if the price Walmart pays for local produce is slightly higher than what it would pay large growers, savings in transport and the ability to order smaller quantities at a time can make up the difference. Contracting directly with farmers, which Walmart intends to do in the future as much as possible, can help eliminate middlemen, who sometimes misrepresent prices. Heritage produce currently accounts for only 4 to 6 percent of Walmart?s produce sales, McCormick told me (already more than a chain might spend on produce in a year, as Fishman would point out), adding that he hopes the figure will get closer to 20 percent, so the program will ?go from experimental to being really viable.?
Michelle Harvey, who is in charge of working with Walmart on agriculture programs at the local Environmental Defense Fund office, summarized a long conversation with me on the sustainability efforts she thinks the company is serious about: ?It?s getting harder and harder to hate Walmart.?
?We support local farmers,? read a sign at an Austin Walmart. I didn?t see any farm names listed in the produce section, but I did find plastic tubs of organic baby spinach and ?spring mix? greens with modern labeling that looked like it could be at Whole Foods. My list was simple to the point of stark, for a fair fight. Some ingredients seemed identical to what I?d find at Whole Foods. Organic, free-range brown eggs. Promised Land all-natural, hormone-free milk. A bottle of Watkins Madagascar vanilla for panna cotta. I couldn?t find much in the way of the seasonal fruit the restaurant had told me the chef would serve with dessert. But I did find, to my surprise, a huge bin of pomegranates, so I bought those, and some Bosc pears. The sticking points were fresh goat cheese, which flummoxed the nice sales people (we found some Alouette brand, hidden), and chicken breasts. I could find organic meat, but no breasts without ?up to 12 percent natural chicken broth? added?an attempt to inject flavor and add weight. I wasn?t happy with the suppliers, either: Tyson predominated. I bought Pilgrims Pride, but was suspicious. The bill was $126.02.
At the flagship Whole Foods, in downtown Austin, the produce was much more varied, though the spinach and spring mix looked less vibrant. The chicken was properly dry, a fresh ivory color?and more than twice as expensive as Walmart?s. My total bill was $175.04; $20 of the extra $50 was for the meat.
Brian Stubbs, the tall, genial young manager of Fino, and Jason Donoho, the chef, were intrigued as they helped me carry bag after bag into the restaurant?s kitchen. They carefully segregated the bags on two shelves of a walk-in refrigerator. The younger cooks looked surprised by the Whole Foods kraft-paper bags, and slightly horrified by the flimsy white plastic ones from Walmart.
The next night 16 critics, bloggers, and general food lovers gathered around a long, high table at the restaurant. Stubbs passed out scoring sheets with bullets for grades of one (worst) to five (best) for each of the four courses, and lines for comments.
The first course, bowls of almonds and pieces of fried goat cheese with red-onion jam and honey, was a clear win for Walmart. The Walmart almonds were described as ?aromatic,? ?mellow,? ?pure,? and ?yummy,? the Whole Foods almonds as ?raw,? though also more ?natural?; they were in fact fresher, though duller in flavor. (Like the best of the food I saw at the Austin Walmart, the packaging for the almonds had a homegrown Mexican look.) The second course, mixed spring greens in a sherry vinaigrette, was another Walmart win: only a few tasters preferred the Whole Foods greens, calling them fresher and heartier-flavored. And only one noticed the little brown age spots on a few Walmart leaves, but she was a ringer?Carol Ann Sayle, a local farmer famous for her greens.
So far Walmart was ahead. But then came the chicken, served with a poached egg on a bed of spinach and golden raisins. A woman whose taste I already thought uncanny?she works as an aromatherapist?compared the broth-infused meat to something out of a hospital cafeteria: ?It?s like they injected it with something to make it taste like fast food.? I thought it was salty, damp, and dismal. The spinach, though, was another story: even the most ardent brothy-breast haters thought the Walmart spinach was fresher.
Dessert was the most puzzling. I had thought that Walmart?s locally sourced milk and exotic-looking vanilla would be the gold standard, but the Whole Foods house brands slaughtered them (?Kicks A?s ass,? one taster wrote). People couldn?t find enough words to diss the Walmart panna cotta (?artificial, thin?) and praise the Whole Foods one (?like a good Christmas?). I wished I?d bought the identical Promised Land milk at Whole Foods, to see if there is in fact a difference in the branded food products that suppliers give Walmart, as there is in the case of other branded products. The pomegranate seeds, sadly, were wan, with barely any flavor, particularly compared with the garnet gems from Whole Foods. But Walmart got points from the chef, and from me, for carrying pomegranates at all.
As I had been in my own kitchen, the tasters were surprised when the results were unblinded at the end of the meal and they learned that in a number of instances they had adamantly preferred Walmart produce. And they weren?t entirely happy.
In an ideal world, people would buy their food directly from the people who grew or caught it, or grow and catch it themselves. But most people can?t do that. If there were a Walmart closer to where I live, I would probably shop there.
Most important, the vast majority of Walmarts carry a large range of affordable fresh fruits and vegetables. And Walmarts serve many ?food deserts,? in large cities and rural areas?ironically including farm areas. I?m not sure I?m convinced that the world?s largest retailer is set on rebuilding local economies it had a hand in destroying, if not literally, then in effect. But I?m convinced that if it wants to, a ruthlessly well-run mechanism can bring fruits and vegetables back to land where they once flourished, and deliver them to the people who need them most.
The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201003/walmart-local-produce
I am the 99%.
Re: Battle of the Organics and Locals: WalMart vs. Whole Foods
I don't buy that Walmart cares about anyone or anything but their bottom line. They're a corporation and in our corporate environment, their number one goal is supposed to be to maximize profits. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if they throw in some "green" products, they will make an extra buck from people who are jumping on the green bandwagon.
If I lived in an area where my only real option was Walmart for organic and sustainable food, I would shop there. Fortunately, I'm not in that situation. There is a Walmart a mile from my house but I don't go there - or to Target, or the other "regular" grocery stores. I would much rather support my locally owned co-op and farmer's market where I know that more of my money is going to the local economy. I don't remember the exact figures but it was somewhere around $.64 per dollar that stays in the local economy when you shop and buy local vs. $.30 some cents when you shop at a big box retailer.
On top of that, I know my co-op is supports local farms (they have the business owners come in for product sample days - I think it's super cool to be able to actually talk to the person who made my food), fair trade and organics. When we buy meat and veggies from the farmer's market, we see with our own eyes who is growing the stuff. We can ask them about their methods, how the animals are raised, what they eat, what crops are sprayed with, etc.. Where I live, there is a pretty large Hmong community and many of the produce farmers at the farmer's market are Hmong. I appreciate that I am supporting them instead of a corporate farm that hires (often undocumented) immigrants and treats them horribly because they can get away with it.
Tired after a long morning of hiking and swimming.
I agree that its unlikely WalMart is doing this for altruistic reasons, although I do think the board/Warren B. probably do feel its a good thing.
I do too.
While organics at Walmart for the most part aren't necessarily going to be up to my standards, I'm not shopping at Walmart, and organic factory farming is at least better than regular petrochemical-laden farming. I'm glad that its bringing organic to the masses, and I think it will lessen the organic as fancy belief.
I still won't shop there (and frankly, while I would, this isn't really a boycott so much as we don't really have Walmart) but for those that do, they'll now be able to purchase foods made under better, although likely not ideal, procedures. I don't see how that's bad.
I don't think it will take away the market from more conscious consumers for several reasons. One, many of us want to know more about our producers and strive to ensure even our organic producers live up to the standards we believe in, and try to support smaller and more local. Two, a lot of people, whether for 'snooty' reasons or preferring to support smaller and/or more local companies, don't want to shop at WalMart.
I don't care how pretty a picture Walmart paints, I don't trust them and will never buy food there. However, if you happen to be one of the many who doesn't have access to local producers/farms or farmers markets, co-ops etc. this is certainly better than nothing. And hopefully it will lessen the stigma of organic being "fancy" or "snobby".
I call bullsh!t on the entire premise of this article. WM isn't starting to carry organic and local produce to help the environment or provide fresher food, they're doing it because they see more people trying to eat better and they want their $$piece$$ of that pie. When I shop, I want my money to go to the person who grew my food, not to Wal-Mart. I also want to be able to see who's growing my food. I see several problems with this article:
I think opting out of a centralized food system is what part of the organic buyers are going for, I know I am. Let's be real here, Wal-Mart is not going to get oranges from the Mom and Pop farm, that farm won't have the volume that they need and won't be reliable enough to give them a standard huge order every week/month/whatever. Whole Foods doesn't source much of their produce locally either for this reason, if you look at their organic produce (especially in the winter) most of it is from California. So Wal-Mart's "local" products will end up being milk from the closest Horizon CAFO. That's not what I'm paying an organic premium to buy. Plus, small local farms will have to increase their yields overnight to match Wal-Mart's demand, and POOF you've got another industrial organic farm.
Then they're not supporting local farmers, are they? They're just claiming they are. The closest distributing center for DelMonte or whatever other mega-brand is not local farms.
Why does any grocery store who's trying to go local get points for carrying unusual fruit out of season?
Why the hell not? The Omnivore's Dilemma says 75 percent of people live within driving distance of a farmer's market. I know pretty much everyone on this board does, and we live all over the country. It's statements like this that makes the average person assume they can't buy real, healthy food and they give up and shop at Wal-Mart. Americans spend about 10% on food, the lowest of any nation. But oh yes we can all have cellphones and nice cars. Why are we shortcutting ourselves on the most important thing, what powers our bodies?
Local produce at Wal-Mart is a contradiction in terms. Multi-acre box stores can't be supplied by small local farmers, there's just no way except to either claim that you're doing it, or consider huge organic farms like Earthbound Farms to be local, if you're close enough to their location in California. While I am glad that Wal-Mart is carrying industrial organic food because that is better than petrochemical-laden conventional food, and Wal-Mart is bringing that options to the masses. But a huge multi-national corporation cannot be local.
I don't feel that organics have been "painted as something elitist" for the walmart shopping "crowd." Organics and locally grown foods are more expensive..and they cut out lower SES groups.... It's a problem, but it doesn't mean people in these groups wouldn't like to have access to better quality foods. This quote assumes that lower SES groups have some aversion to the "elitist" organic apple..and do not care or want to have access to healthier foods. THAT is a truly elitist attitude. Without being in that group..how can you assume what they care about?
You may not like WM and that's fine--however, with childhood obesity at an all time high in this country and it is rampant within lower SES groups who may shop at WM. if WM is bringing access to higher quality fresh foods to children or even more healthy choices within the packaged areas--then think it has potential.
For me, this would make me more likely to shop at WM. We don't really have much for options as far as local organic produce. Typically, WM's regular produce is pretty terrible.
There's a farmers market in our town two days a week except for in the winter, and I go there, but otherwise if I want organic I have to get it from the regular grocery store, and it certainly isn't local, if I want local I can get some items at the smaller grocery store, but it wont be organic.
I don't necessarily think that WM is going to single handedly make people healthier, but I don't really think that local organic is "above" the typical walmart shopper either. I think that if people have a reasonably priced alternative to the shipped from anywhere produce currently available, people will be apt to at least try it.
I just don't think that there can be any assumptions made about a group (or groups) of people that you or I don't really know anything about...and I feel like you are again assuming about the very vast and very diverse clientele of WM shoppers without much to go on other than..."Joe the six pack?" Which is a completely stereotypical idea.
Walmart sucks. Until they change their entire business practice, having organic food there isn't going to make me shop there.
My MIL works for Walmart and they barely pay her anything so she has to go on BadgerCare (Wisconsin's low income health care plan). So basically me and all the tax payers of Wisconsin are paying for her health insurance, as well as most of their other employees. this is the way Walmart operates, intentially trying NOT to pay their employees enough to live off of and not providing benefits.
Hmm. I guess we see things differently. I see that WM advertises low prices...but I never have seen them showing "Joe the Six Pack" type marketing. And in fact...I found this, with several ads from WM..NONE of these people look like "Joe the Six pack," who might turn their nose up at fancy organics. In fact, notice in the ads they are using reusable bags, one ad talks about the environment...
Again, WM appears to cater to....families. Of all sorts--who are value conscious...but not necessarily "organic averse."
http://www.adbrands.net/us/wal-mart_us.htm
I agree. Our current WM flyer is all about eating healthy while on a budget. It offers a grocery list of healthy items, tips on grilling and steaming, and meal ideas, and in the non food section it has work out equipment, videos, and there's a section with vitamins. Although the food items are not organic or local, there isn't one sale on soda, chips, or candy listed.
I think that's a step in the right direction, and with a little advertising about local, organic produce it will become a big seller.
I think that Walmart has a multitude of sins going on- it's not just about how they treat their workers, or that they don't cover up their fertilizer in their parking lots which results in disgusting run-off that pollutes local waterways, or that they cost taxpayers millions and millions of dollars because so many of their employees have to be on one form or another of public assistance.
I don't care if they were giving away organic reusable bags and had green roofs put on all of their stores with windmills, there is so much for them to fix, this is not even a drop in the ocean.
Thank you, pp!
My thoughts exactly!
Well said!