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A couple of years ago, as winter gave way to spring, Toyoda Ruff began to think about changing how she ate. Ruff had always been heavy, but her son, Tarik, a freshman honor student, had recently crossed the 300-pound mark, prompting Ruff to ferry him to appointments at a children’s weight loss clinic, 11 miles away in Detroit’s Midtown neighborhood, and to document everything he ate for two months. At 270 pounds, her husband, Jermaine Harris, wanted to slim down, too. Ruff was beginning to see her family’s weekly fast-food habit and visits to Golden Corral’s all-you-can-eat buffet as a problem.

As Ruff mulled over these changes, a friend cajoled her into joining a healthy cooking class at their church. Ruff was on medical leave from her job as a probation officer due to an injury, and the break gave her time to consider her meals. The more she thought about eating healthy, the more intrigued she was by a new store: Whole Foods, which had just opened in Detroit. “It was on the news. People were talking about it at church,” Ruff said. “Everybody was talking about it.”

That included people outside of Detroit, too. As the city neared bankruptcy, national media questionedwhy a grocer derided as “Whole Paycheck”—a nod to the chain’s longstanding strategy of charging a premium for organic, local, and sustainable food—would open a store there. Whole Foods’ answer was even more surprising: The store, said company leaders, was about social equity as much as profit.

We’re coming to confront the disconnect between the accessibility and the affordability in healthy food,” declared Walter Robb, the co-CEO of Whole Foods, in an early 2012 address to Detroit business leaders. There would be lower prices, too, to make the store accessible to “all of Detroit.” Robb’s nod to the growing dietary gap between rich and poor was surprising for a man leading a company known for appealing to white, monied foodies. That April, he went even further. Addressing corporate leaders at the Milken Institute Global Conference, Robb said that at the Detroit store “we’re going after elitism. We’re going after racism.” And real success, Robb told me later, would include seeing that “health outcomes are being improved” in Detroit.


After church, Toyoda Ruff stops at a gas station with her
family to grab some snacks before heading home, on Oct. 12.
Photo by Marcin Szczepanski

Those were big goals for any supermarket, but they were especially a stretch for Whole Foods. First lady Michelle Obama’s initiative to open new supermarkets in order to expand access to healthy foods has made it commonplace for grocers to talk about health, but it is unusual for grocers to talk about lowering prices to make healthy food more accessible. Whole Foods would almost certainly need to do that in Detroit, where more than one-third of the city lives below the poverty line. What’s more, Whole Foods’ central conceit as a company is that it sells only the best, healthiest food-which sometimes requires paying more. The Detroit store marked the grocer’s first big experiment testing whether lower-income shoppers like Ruff-a public employee with a master’s degree in social work, she is roughly middle class but sometimes struggles to pay her bills-would find that line of reasoning persuasive.