The Great Grocery Smackdown

So it appears the food series continues over infrequent blog posts.( I've now added a food category for blog posts for locating these previous pieces.) Today's entry steals its title directly from The Atlantic magazine article that pits Walmart against Whole Foods in the areas of sustainably raised foods and family budgets. I read this article over the weekend and was fascinated by the "Walmart effect" countering big agriculture. Even to write that seems counterintuitive. Yet, there are signs this is one way Walmart's buying power might be surprisingly benign. And in fairness, as we examine food safety and agribusiness issues, we should take a look at what some companies are doing right. In this excerpt, Atlantic senior editor Corby Kummer explores his own surprised reaction to Walmart's efforts:

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.

Your comments are welcome. There aren't any Walmart grocery stores near where I live, so I'd like to know what you all have found.

Comments

[Ashleigh]

I'm a Wal-Mart shopper, but have a love/hate relationship with them. Food, Inc. highlighted Wal-Mart's buying power for organic farmers as well.

I think all in all, it's an education issue. When I learned how high the hormone levels were in mass produced milk, I switched to organic for my kids. But when I first switched, Wal-Mart only carried Horizon organic milk. So that was my only option. But a year or so ago they started producing Great Value (their store brand) organic milk - which is a tad cheaper and now my staple.

I think once people understand the benefits of not just organic, but LOCALLY produced food, they would switch - ESPECIALLY if it was affordable. And affordability is Wal-Mart's specialty.

I'm glad to know they are funding these initiatives. Makes me feel like my Great Value purchases are more than just cost savers for me, but a vote for local foods.

[Stacey]

Thank you for posting this interesting article. My hometown got taken over by Wal-Mart several years ago and has never recovered from it (local businesses shut down, down-town died). I am proud to say that i haven't stepped foot in a Wal-Mart in over 3 years. It should be interesting to see if Wal-Mart leads the way in retail towards buying local foods.

I hope that perhaps they will start looking at other business practices of theirs in the same light as food. They are, after all, one of the main reasons why lots of factories that paid good wages & benefits to people in this country closed down. There is a high price for cheap goods. There are major justice and ethical issues that Wal-Mart (and other large companies) need to face and change.

[Deb W]

Some larger companies get labeled with the "Greenwashing" title (talking the talk and not walking the walk when it comes to sustainability, in order to increase their market share). Initially, most people in the produce industry (where I used to be a sustainability SME)put Wal-Mart in this "Greenwashing" category. However, over some time and the efforts of Ron McCormick, their sustainability efforts truly are the real deal. Case study after case study shows that Wal-Mart has moved to the forefront of the industry's sustainability movement -- in every area -- from their operations (lighting, refrigeration, waste management, etc.) to the growers (local farmers and promoting sustainable agricultural practices), to transportation modes, to full implementation of tracebility (an essential component to food safety) and so forth.

While I do believe that Wal-Mart's corporate arm is sincere about their relatively newfound emphasis on sustainability, they do still have a long way to go in the area of public perception if their efforts will be considered holistically and authentically true.
Thanks for posting this!

[KS]

My local Walmart (in Southern California) doesn't carry fresh produce; if it did, I probably would buy produce there. The fresh produce at Whole Foods is relatively expensive, but I enjoy shopping there and I agreed with CEO John Mackey's views on the Obama health care proposals.