¡Join the fight!
Walmart's gettin' serious about hitting the high-end, fresh supermarket market. Via Lee Zukor on Twitter comes this Atlantic article by Corby Kummer, The Great Grocery Smackdown.
Do read it. The article has that breathless, omgomgomg tone of a man having his circuits blown. In this case, it's Walmart selling local, sustainable, and organic produce that's rearranging Cummer's brain:
[F]riends started telling me I needed to look seriously at Walmart’s efforts to sell sustainably raised food... Read more...
I'm caught somewhere between total dismay, slight interest, and head-shaking disbelief on this one:
Whole Foods to give greater employee discounts to workers with lower BMI, cholesterol Read more...
As rather breathlessly reported in the AP on Christmas Day, John Mackey is stepping down as Chairman of the Board for Whole Foods Market, and the reporter credits pressure from an activist investment group called CtW. From the AP story on ABC News:
At Whole Foods' annual shareholders meeting in March, CtW Investment Group, a shareholder activist group that works with union pension funds, unsuccessfully proposed that the CEO and chairman roles be separated. The grocer said it has been receiving these proposals for three years. Read more...
John Mackey CEO of Whole Foods went on John Stossel's brand-new show on Fox Business News last week in what seems to be Stage 2 in his rebranding of Whole Foods.
Long-time critics of Mackey's will point out out that the man has never been shy about airing his conservative, libertarian politics. True, but he's never gone on Fox with an arch-conservative opiniojournalist in order to bash liberal ideals quite like this, to my knowledge. Read more...
Two families are suing a Whole Foods Market store in West Hartford, Connecticut, and a now-defunct dairy. The family are seeking damages from the store and farm for selling tainted raw milk which, in 2008, caused three children to be hospitalized from E. coli infection. Via The Hartford Cuurant: Read more...
Bob St. Peter has a provocative piece over at Grassroots Economic Organizing (a piece that was originally printed in Saving Seeds, Summer/Fall 2008) about the failure of food co-ops to truly transform, or provide an alternative to the nation's food system. While I don't agree with everything in the article, it's worth a close read, especially if you're a manager at a natural foods co-op or belong to one as a member.
From the article: Read more...
Last night, a friend on Twitter (who runs this excellent blog) asked me if I thought John Mackey should be fired for his remarks in the Wall Street Journal on health insurance reform, which got me thinking that maybe I should delineate my feelings about Whole Foods, the boycott, and the dust-up as a whole, just so regular readers know where this blog stands. Read more...
Michael Pollan is his effusively urbane self in speaking out against the Whole Foods boycott.
Whole Foods is not perfect, however if they were to disappear, the cause of improving Americans’ health by building an alternative food system, based on more fresh food, pastured and humanely raised meats and sustainable agriculture, would suffer. I happen to believe health care reform has the potential to drive big changes in the food system, and to enlist the health care industry in the fight to reform agriculture... Read more...
Now it's getting serious. From Yahoo Finance, CtW Investment Group Calls for Whole Foods Board to Remove Chair and CEO John Mackey
From the article (with additional links provided by Fair Food Fight): Read more...
No I don't. I adore saying I told you so.
In the recent hubub over at Whole Foods Market, It looks like there's now a trackable and dramatic drop in brand perception of Whole Foods, directly traceable to the vocal outburst from customers angry about CEO John Mackey's Wall Street Journal editorial. Check out the stats over at Mashable's As Whole Foods Boycott Grows on Facebook, Brand Perception Drops. But here's the lowdown: Read more...
