If you thought green ethics and big profits made unlikely bedfellows, you probably haven't heard of Whole Foods Market. The US chain of natural-food supermarkets has turned shopping for lentils into a fashion statement for both urban eco-warriors and celebrities with a conscience, creating a $4bn (pounds 2.1bn) monolith of the American organic movement en route.
From its modest beginnings in the Seventies, when its customers were mainly college students and long-haired hippies, the group has blazed a (carbon neutral) trail, establishing 183 stores across the continent. In an industry where saving pennies tends to count for more than saving the environment, Whole Foods is revered as something of a green institution.
Now, the group is aiming to repeat the success it has had Stateside with a chain of natural-food superstores over here. First up will be a three-floor ethical extravaganza on Kensington High Street, where the venerable Barkers department store once stood. Eventually, Whole Foods wants its wholesome vision to span the country, via a 40strong chain of shops.
But to get that far, Whole Foods will have to persuade British consumers that it offers more than just a backdrop for the paparazzi to snap Gwyneth Paltrow or Kate Moss (both already shop at the six Fresh & Wild stores that the US group bought two years ago). It will need to provide a credible alternative to established chains such as Waitrose and Marks & Spencer, which have long worn their ethical hearts on their sleeves. In short, it must be more than merely green. "It has to be whiter than white wherever possible," says Helen Taylor, marketing director at the Soil Association, the UK organic lobby group.
Already, US sceptics have dubbed Whole Foods the "Wal-Mart of Wheatgerm" over charges that it pursues profits over its organic ideals. It will thus no doubt be anxious to avoid being tagged as the "Tesco of Tofu" when it opens its doors over here.
To escape that epithet, Whole Foods will need to have done its UK eco-homework. Its shelves will have to groan with fresh local produce, its fish will need to be off the endangered list, its condiments whipped up in a regional kitchen, or not at all, and its bacon sliced only off pigs who have lived a long, happy life. Air miles will be a no-no, unless they have transported Fair-trade chocolate made from beans grown by a Mexican farmer, as will excess packaging and mountains of carrier bags at the checkout.
But fresh-food buyers at some of the country's biggest grocers warn that all this will require a reliable army of organic farmers who will supply top quality produce. And yet demand for organic produce is already outstripping supply in the UK. Sainsbury's is paying dairy farmers to go organic so it can meet milk demand two years from now the time it takes farms to convert.
John Mackay, a college dropout who founded a forerunner of Whole Foods nearly three decades ago, is prepared for the going to be tough. "First of all we expect we will be attacked and there will be a certain amount of negative publicity. Americans are not perceived as very food savvy, and [people will think] it is another big corporation," the group's vegan chairman and chief executive recently told The lndependent. He draws comfort from the fact that he faced a similarly sceptical audience five years ago before opening in New York, where Whole Foods is now practically a city institution.
Yet a wander around the Union Square outlet in Manhattan throws up any number of ethical dilemmas for the green-minded shopper. Are organic carrots air-freighted from France a good idea? Should the retailer be stocking Granny Smith apples from New Zealand and peppers from Holland when California's fields are groaning with produce? How environmentally sound is it to grab a pack of sausages from a doorless, upright freezer or buy a lunchtime snack from its raw salad counter in a throwaway plastic pot?
Co-op America, an environmental lobby group, thinks Whole Foods "stands out among the supermarket giants as having done the most to put sustainable grocery shopping into mainstream consciousness". But it dishes up the criticisms even so, lamenting in particular its limited stock of Fair-trade products, its lack of information about the use of toxic chemicals in products it sells such as baby bottles, and its anti-union stance. "As a grocery store catering to the green marketplace, Whole Foods has much to improve," it adds.
Even US organic acolytes believe Mackay needs to be kept on his toes. Mark Kastel, director of the Cornucopia Institute, admittedly one of the nation's more aggressive organic farming watchdogs, says: 'Although, in general, Whole Foods is a responsible partner in the organic community, like with any large corporation which has a master on Wall Street, it needs to be watched."
It is precisely the company's organic credentials that have come in for the most scrutiny in the States. Although Whole Foods purports to be "all about organics", the company manages to muddy the waters between so-called "natural" foods and those that adhere to strict organic guidelines.
"It mainly sells natural foods with a thin veneer of organic. For Whole Foods, 'natural' is more a marketing tool," says Ronnie Cummins, national director of the US Organic Consumers' Association. Even Whole Foods' own brand, 365, is not organic, nor is its prepared food.
A fierce debate has raged in the US press in the past few weeks between Mackay and Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and hailed as a "rock star" in the organic farming world, over just this issue. In his best-selling book, Pollan suggested Whole Foods used organic, local and artisanal food as a "window dressing [to] help sell a much more ordinary industrial product".
His biggest gripe is the rise of organic superfarms in the States, which he says have subverted the organic farming ideals by turning organic food into a cheap commodity as opposed to an ecofriendly way of life. This "industrialisation" of organic food hastened by Whole Foods' need to find suppliers to feed its expanding top line is threatening to cost the movement its soul and render its produce flavourless, Pollan argues, finding particular fault with some "cardboard"-tasting Argentine organic asparagus.
"In an era of energy scarcity, the purchase of such products does little to advance the ideal of sustainability that once upon a time animated the organic movement. These foods may contain no pesticides, but they are drenched in petroleum even so," he recently wrote.
Others agree. Paul Rauber, of the US environmental group Sierra Club, said: "The only beef that anyone has with Whole Foods is what comes with having stores on such a large scale. It is sourcing organic food from large US growers or from growers in Chile or elsewhere, and transporting it across the country. There is a debate about whether it makes environmental sense to ship organic food that far."
Mackay hit back, pointing out that the organic foods movement was but a fringe front before Whole Foods Market came along. He unveiled a range of initiatives to bolster the group's street cred with its biggest spenders, organic consumers, from buying more local produce to giving $10m a year in low-interest loans to help small, local farmers and producers of humanely reared meat, poultry and dairy products.
"Whole Foods could and should do more to support local agriculture," Mackay conceded. Another promise was to allow farmers' markets to trade in the car parks of some of its biggest stores if only on Sundays. Yet it is not clear that even these pledges will go far enough for those consumers in the UK who are tired of the Tescopoly school of retailing.
Fred Shank, the group's spokesman for its stores on the US East Coast and the UK, said that at least 10 per cent of a store's sales should come from produce sourced locally, but warned: "Let's be honest. Great Britain can't feed itself" Whole Foods is understood to be taking a broad interpretation of what constitutes "local" in the UK: for its purposes, anything grown or produced in Great Britain will suffice. One rival retailer pointed out that if Whole Foods applies the same 200-mile radius in the UK as it does in some parts of the US, "local" could mean French pate.
Given Whole Foods' immense brand equity and the premium prices it charges, which have earned it another nickname, "Whole Paycheck" Cummins is critical that the retailer is not proactive enough. "It does the right thing with enough customer pressure and exposure in the media, but left to itself it is seeking to maximise profit just like any other $4bn corporation."
When this includes banning the sale of live lobsters and crabs because it believes the trade in sentient crustaceans to be inhumane, it seems churlish to quibble about how it might have reached that decision. Likewise its tough stance on genetically modified ingredients, which incidentally is slowing down its take up of bio-based packaging since that tends to be made from corn, the GM bogeyman par excellence.
On one key green measure, Whole Foods is streets ahead of its future UK rivals. The company offsets all the energy used by its stores by purchasing wind-energy credits from a Colorado-based outfit that produces renewable power. This gets added to the US national grid. It also seeks to L compost as much as 80 per cent of the waste each of its stores generate a trick it will hope to repeat in the UK.
Whole Foods has won its loyal following because it goes several hundred thousand food miles further in soothing shoppers' eco qualms than any other retailer. But that is only right for a company whose mission is: "Whole Foods, Whole People, Whole Planet." It deserves to be challenged. As the Cornucopia Institute's Kastel puts it: "We have a saying in the US. 'Show me!' In other words, talk is cheap. Let's see the proof."
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Susie Mesure,
Retail Correspondent,
The Independent
Direct Tel: 020 7005 2485
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UK Newspaper Cites OCA & Other Organic Leaders: How Organic is the Whole Foods Natural Supermarket Chain?
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Too good to be true?
In the US, it's the corporate face of natural foods - and a hit with eco-conscious stars. Now it's coming here. But Whole Foods Market may not be so wholesome.
By Susie Mesure
Independent News and Media Limited / UK, September 14, 2006
