The Business of Food: Big Food, Small Food, by Flavie Moadab

The Business of Food: Big Food, Small Food by Flavie

Today we went exclusively to Whole Foods Market (http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/) with the entire class.

We started at 8 am and had an appointment with the team leader Rich Howley who take 1 hour of his time to present us very precisely this company. It was very nice arriving at Whole Foods, you automatically feel the difference with other normal brands. It’s cleaner and healthier, we can find a big range of products, and most of them are organic which is rare here in the USA.

The most important you have to look for when you go to a Whole Foods is to check out this sign on the products: it’s the label guarantee of Whole Foods market.

It is a certificate partnership program the firm has with the famers: quality and respect of the organic food.

The farmers working with Whole Foods don’t use any pesticides or chemical products on their products which means that you can’t keep them as long as you can keep chemical treated food. That’s probably one supply chain problem they have because the food can’t stay long time in the store, they have to sell them quickly. But this is also what makes Whole Foods special.

You can find many information in the store, about the products, their provenance, how the meat and fish has been raised, how the vegetables have been treated and so on. I think it’s very honest to communicate that way with your clients. They even tell what they use to build the store (which materials).

I was also impressed by the fact that they don’t sell some very famous brands because they are chemical. They stick to their values and this is very rare in business nowadays.

Even if Whole Foods is the only supermarket which proposes that kind of food and quality, this is a new trend which is getting more and more important nowadays. People are aware of how bad some products and food can be for their health (like GMO: http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/gmo-your-right-know) and tend to make some efforts to eat cleaner and healthier even if it’s more expensive than junk food (http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/about-our-products/quality-standards). 

 And this is how little farms and fair trade and organic farms have seen their system grow: people take care of their food and their health and the only way to do it is to buy products where you can check their provenance. While big companies buy from everywhere in the world and don’t care about quality, stores like Whole Foods and other organic companies pay attention to it and that’s what makes the difference.

This reminds me of one movie I saw years ago and from which “Food,Inc” has been inspired : Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. It’s a very powerful movie and I think that everybody should watch it and change his or hers foods habits.

After the visit, we had some free time to interview a few employees working at Whole Foods. I asked questions about merchandising and marketing there but many employees weren’t really informed and were only doing “what the manager says”. I think it’s not very interesting to work like this, you should do things because you understand them and not only because you were told to…

But I finally got someone to call me one manager who told me that the place and the way they place their food impacts the sales. For example when they put the bread near the frozen food nobody will buy it, and when they put it near the bakery people will buy it, even if it’s the same bread who just was unfrozen. It’s funny to see how people act unconsciously while shopping!

For lunch we were free too chose what we wanted, I had a brown rice salmon teriyaki, which I loved because the fish was well prepared and tasteful, which isn’t often the case.

While we were eating we had the visit of Michael Moody (http://www.michaelmoodyfitness.com/). He is a fitness trainer and he told us a lot about healthy food and work out and how important it is for our body. He us a coach mentor and told us about fitness networking.