After several years of work by our grower and certifying partner, we’re pleased to announce that we can now offer Whole Trade® bell peppers to our customers. Grown in greenhouses outside the city of Culiacán in Sinaloa, Mexico, loose and packaged Whole Trade bell peppers will be available in most of our stores from January until May, when US production ramps up again.

Our Whole Trade® Guarantee ensures fair prices are paid for products, better wages and working conditions, and sound environmental practices. These Whole Trade bell peppers also generate a 1% donation of retail sale value to the Whole Planet Foundation.

These peppers come from Divemex, growers we have worked with for a few years now. We were pleased when Fair Trade USA came in as a certifier and helped the company meet their rigorous standards, which now qualifies the peppers for our Whole Trade Guarantee.

Recently, a group from our produce team visited the Divemex 175-acre greenhouse farm. They toured the facilities, learned about their production techniques and met some of the 600 people who are employed at the farm. Here’s what Matt Rogers of Whole Foods Market Produce had to say about the trip:

It was still a couple of weeks before harvest when we visited, but we saw some nice green peppers maturing on the plants. From a quality perspective, we like to see peppers with good blocky shape, full seed pack, even cavities around the seeds, and nice thick walls. Color comes on about three weeks after a pepper is mature and green. In the next five months, this farm will produce more than 10 million pounds of colored bell peppers!

With the Fair Trade certification, Whole Foods Market and our customers receive independent verification that working conditions and environmental practices on the farm meet high standards. Fair Trade also requires that a part of our purchase price be passed through to a fund controlled directly by the workers on the farm. The workers vote on how to invest the money to benefit their communities.

We met with the workers committee and they explained that the workforce had already voted to support three distinct education support programs for different interest groups:

• One for children of workers to support basic needs associated with attending primary school (uniforms, transportation, etc.)
• Another for workers themselves who want to continue their secondary education while they work
• And a separate one for workers seeking professional training of some sort to advance their careers.

Many of the workers at this farm are migrants from other areas of Mexico and special attention has been paid to ensure the families of these workers will also have access to the programs. We’re always excited to be able to support growers like Divemex who take the quality of their product and the wellness of their workforce seriously.

We hope you’ll pick up these peppers in our stores and help make this new program a success. Tell us what you think. When you buy something like bell peppers, do you consider the impact your purchase makes?

Take a look behind the scenes at Whole Foods Market’s Gluten Free Bakehouse.  In 1996, Lee Tobin was diagnosed with celiac disease, and, as a baker in our Chapel Hill, North Carolina, store, this presented a real challenge.  But Lee took it on! He began experimenting with gluten free baking on his own time, developing recipes that rivaled conventional goods in flavor and texture.  Over the years, Lee’s gluten free breads and baked goods flew off the shelves faster and faster.  By October 2004, he was proud to fire up the gluten free ovens in the new, completely separate, dedicated facility: the Whole Foods Market Gluten Free Bakehouse.

Last year around this time I posted a short piece titled “It’s Summer in February” about peak of summer fruit from Chile. I wrote that some of our favorite deals on the produce team are those where we know the grower and have seen the fruit in production across multiple seasons.

Time flies, it’s a whole year later and it’s summer in February once again. It may be winter in the States, but we’ll soon be enjoying a taste of summer from a grower that we love. Read the rest of this entry »

As you may know, we’ve had a series of cold fronts passing through the state of Florida in recent days. We’ve received a lot of questions about how this weather affects supplies of products traditionally produced in Florida during the winter months. Here’s a quick recap:

Strawberry supplies will be tight throughout the industry for the next six to eight weeks. Florida is basically wiped out at the same time that Mexico is cool and rainy and California is cool with rain in the forecast. Not a great recipe for strawberries, but not that unusual for the season either! There will be limited strawberries in the marketplace – certainly less than we would wish for! Read the rest of this entry »

In this episode, I traveled to Monroe, WI to visit the Klondike Cheese Company, one of the few feta producers in the United States that meets our Quality Standards. The Buholzer family has grown the company tremendously since they started making cheese in 1925. Our partnership with this family owned, third generation operation began back in 2002. Even though they are now a large company, they only work with 85 locally family-owned dairy farms and because the milk is fresh, the cheese is deliciously fresh too. My personal favorites include the Mediterranean feta and the feta with black pepper.

In this final installment of Dispatches from the Field, Steve visits the Pro Mujer

headquarters in Salta, Argentina and operations in Tucuman, Argentina, where Whole Foods Market sources blueberries.  His interviews with Pro Mujer clients, Pinky and Graciela, unveil the power of access to credit in their communities, where these women have been able to build support networks and find access to affordable healthcare services.

On this leg of his trip through South America, Steve explores Paraguay and opportunities for building a microcredit program in the country where Whole Foods Market sources its organic sugar cane.  Steve experiences the hospitality of folks who remember Phillip Sansone, Executive Director of the Whole Planet Foundation, from his days as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay over 30 years ago.

In this installment of Dispatches from the Field, Steve and Philip brave oxygen deprivation and “Death Road” (renowned as the most dangerous road in the world) to reach folks in the rural communities of Bolivia with Pro Mujer to provide financial services coupled with health and education.

Steve Wanta and Phillip Sansone of the Whole Planet Foundation meet with women entrepreneurs of Peru who have benefited from microloans from the Whole Planet Foundation. In less than one year, working with Pro Mujer, The Whole Planet Foundation has provided loans to over 1200 woman. This capital has allowed these entrepreneurs to grow their businesses, provide for their families and plan for the future in ways that were previously unavailable.

Here at Whole Foods Market, we are always driven by our Core Values, and that includes selling the highest quality products available, satisfying and delighting our customers and caring about our communities and environment. With those values in mind, Chuck Anunciation, one of our Produce Field Inspectors, and I recently visited Chile where we met our new Rainforest Alliance certified table grape growers and inspected their crop.  Grown in the San Felipe and Rancagua regions of Chile, we have partnered with the growers Exser, Gioia and Aldunate to feature the sweetest, most flavorful grapes available while ensuring their farms protect soils, waterways, wildlife habitat and the rights and welfare of workers, their families and communities. What a strong connection with our Core Values.

Read the rest of this entry »