I was pretty disappointed late last week to learn that there was a smear campaign afoot, by a group claiming that Whole Foods Market is working to “undermine” the integrity of the organic food label. What?! It seems like this happens every couple of years, usually based on some sort of claim that large food corporations are inherently evil and out to dilute the organic standards to make organic food cheaper to produce so they can make millions off of unsuspecting, gullible shoppers. Insert your best evil laugh here: Mwah-ha-ha!

Ludicrous yes. True no. We’d have to be insane to push for weaker organic standards. A strong standard gives food shoppers something to trust. The “organic” label represents a strong regulation that ensures the food is grown without toxic and persistent chemicals on environmentally friendly farms. We fought hard for decades to get that regulation established and the last thing we’d want to do is jeopardize its value by chipping it away.

A small and passionate group of people who wanted to create a natural and organic alternative to the mainstream conventional grocery stores of the era opened the doors of our first tiny store 30 years ago, about four blocks from where I’m sitting now. Since day one, we’ve supported organic agriculture, and we now offer more organic products than our founders could have imagined back in 1980. And we add more and more year after year. Here are some basic facts about our commitment to organic: Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most important things Whole Foods Market does is expressed in our first Core Value: Selling the highest quality natural and organic products available. You’ll find that statement on our walls, our website, our brochures, etc. But what do “natural” and “organic” mean, and who sets the definition? I’ll start to get into the nitty gritty details of these questions in this post. For background, you may want to check out my introduction to the topic of quality standards from last week. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been avoiding this post. Not because I don’t love talking about what I do, but because I couldn’t figure out how to shrink this topic – an overview of our Quality Standards – into an easily digestible post. But then our lovely blogmistress (Paige Brady) told me I could write a series rather than a single post. Yeah!

Just as I was breathing a sigh of relief, she hit me with this bombshell: Could you use the first post in the series to explain our Quality Standards in a way that an 11-year-old can understand? What!?

Seems that she was in our downtown Austin store over the weekend with her daughter’s 11-year-old friend, who had never been to our store before. She was thoroughly enthralled and amazed – remember your first step inside our store? Anyway, the friend asked, “Is everything here organic?” and Paige said “no” but that everything was natural. And then fumbled through various attempts at explaining what natural means – realizing as she rambled that a typical 11-year-old doesn’t have the background to understand how much junk is in our conventional food supply. Paige eventually came up with this: “You won’t find blue ketchup here because ketchup comes from tomatoes and tomatoes aren’t blue in nature.” And the friend got it: “So, ketchup is red here?” Yes. Read the rest of this entry »

We encourage you to join in the forum discussion instead of posting a comment on this blog entry.

Studies about Bisphenol-A (BPA), the plastic monomer used to make polycarbonate plastic, have been getting a ton of media attention lately, and our customers have had quite a few questions about it. While we certainly don’t have all the answers, we wanted to share with you what the research currently shows and what we, as a company, are doing to address the issue.

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My colleague Jody Villecco and I recently spent a few days on the backroads of New England, meeting the technical folks from two of our oldest supplier partners: Tom’s of Maine and Seventh Generation. Jody, I, and our team are the official “geeks” of Whole Foods Market; we spend most of our work lives researching products and their ingredients, buried in technical food science and nutrition reports, and generally geeking out about our products as we establish standards for what we sell in our stores. Fortunately for us, there are similar technical teams working at many of the companies whose products we sell, and the time we spend talking shop with them is educational, valuable to our work, and fun.

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Every week I see dozens of myths and misunderstandings about food and our company come across my desk, confused thoughts ranging from “Everything Whole Foods sells is organic” to “Canola oil is a secret poison” to “Whole Foods Market is owned by Paul Newman.” This is the first in a series of posts aimed at sharing – and clearing up – some of the more popular misunderstandings floating around out there. Through these examples, I’d like to illustrate the lengths we go to “do the homework” about natural foods and to make sure that there’s nothing in our products that you’d be surprised to find there. If you have any particular questions or topics you want to see covered, post a comment down below and let me know what you want to hear about.

Who we are and what we do

Look around near the doors of any one of our stores and you’ll likely find our commitment to “Selling the Highest Quality Natural and Organic Products Available” painted directly on the wall. This promise, the first of our company’s core values, seems simple at first glance, but becomes complicated once you start to consider the words “natural” and “organic” and what they really mean. I’ll save “organic” for another post, but what does “natural” mean, and who decides? Well, we do, and we take the job very seriously.

Read the rest of this entry »

Update: June 13, 2010

Since I wrote this post about two years ago, we’ve had a few changes and I wanted to make sure anyone reading this is up to speed on current information.

As of this summer (2010), we are no longer sourcing any of our Whole Foods Market 365 Everyday Value food products from China EXCEPT for frozen edamame (shelled and unshelled, organic and conventional). This means that out of more than 2,000 365 Everyday Value products right now, only ten are from China. These products include tea and frozen vegetables. We will be selling through the remaining stock of six of those over the summer, and the edamame will be the only one remaining at that time.

I want to be really clear that we didn’t stop sourcing from China because of quality or food safety concerns. As I explain in the post below, we have always had great confidence in our vendor partners in China, and we have taken great steps – including visiting farms and processing facilities ourselves, in addition to organic certification — to verify that those suppliers have the same level of integrity and commitment to quality as the rest of our partners across the world.

Our move to other sources is simply that through a routine bidding process, we found several suppliers in other countries, including the U.S., that offered the same or better quality at better prices. This was primarily a business decision – changing vendors was a good decision for our customers right now. As mentioned, we will continue to source edamame from China because we are not able to find the same high quality edamame for the same price anywhere else. (In order to provide our customers with a choice, we also stock a premium, domestic frozen edamame from Columbia River Organics, a family-owned farm in Washington State.)

While some of our customers have questioned our sourcing from China, ultimately this was a business decision based on maintaining or improving both the quality and price of our private label products. It’s possible that we will source more products from China again in the future. The bottom line is that beyond quality and price, we give our customers many choices in the products we offer and where they are sourced.

Another important clarification: it has always been our policy and practice to clearly label fresh produce with its country of origin. While we do not purchase fresh produce from China for national distribution, in some circumstances stores may bring in Chinese products such as edamame, ginger, shiitake mushroom and garlic. For example, in the Vancouver market items with origins in Asia are very common and in high demand. Product of China may be among our offerings in select markets such as Vancouver BC. Again, there is always country of origin labeling by all fresh produce.

We appreciate all of your feedback. Read on for more details.

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Original Post

I spend more than half my work time thinking about, researching and talking about organic food. As part of my job as Quality Standards and Organic Programs Coordinator, I work with our stores and suppliers to help them understand and follow the National Organic Standards, to ensure that what they’re selling as organic truly is. I also work with non-profit organizations, certifiers and others to support organic agriculture, and I carefully follow the USDA’s National Organic Program and their ongoing work on the standard. Given all my work with organics, the Whole Story Blog powers-that-be asked me to answer one of the more perplexing questions that’s been floating around lately: Can organic food from China truly be organic? Read the rest of this entry »