aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, May 05, 2007

Whole Foods: a Goliath coming to the UK

With one store it becomes the largest food retailer in London. The Telegraph:

Whole Foods Market, America’s most aggressive and successful “natural” supermarket, is coming to Britain.

On June 6, the three-floor former Barker’s department store in Kensington, west London, is set to be transformed into the company’s signature hanging gardens of Babylon.

Planet Organic’s largest London store is 5,500 sq ft; Fortnum & Mason’s recently expanded food floors boast 18,500 sq ft. Whole Foods will be 80,000 sq ft - the size of the new Wembley Stadium.

But there’s more:

“We’re looking at 30 to 40 stores in the UK high street, at the rate of one a year,” regional vice-president David Lannon tells me over a sparkling water when we meet in New York at the latest downtown Manhattan branch (72,000 sq ft). A large man who looks partial to the odd organic brownie, Lannon is supremely confident about the company’s first European venture.

Wherever you live in Britain, if you have a favourite natural food store you should take notice, because not much survives when Whole Foods comes to town. It is a behemoth, to which independent retailers are just so much small fry.

As it happens, “small” is the current food buzz-word in Britain. Farmers’ markets are booming; small producers are fêted. We cherish the notion that natural and organic equals small, slow and preferably local. Why is Whole Foods so confidently importing its wholly different approach and why does it think it’s going to work here?

“You journalists,” Lannon chuckles. “You romanticise small.”

You might almost think Whole Foods wants to be to food as Google is to the web, complete with “Do no evil” mantra:

“We believe in a virtuous circle entwining the food chain, human beings and Mother Earth: each is reliant upon the others through a beautiful and delicate symbiosis.” Giving: $10million a year in low-interest loans to help small, local farmers and producers of grass-fed and humanely raised meat, poultry and dairy animals. Hires an “animal compassionate field buyer” to work with producers to ensure that they meet the standards. Sets up Sunday farmers’ markets in the car parks of some US Whole Foods stores.

I’m aware that critics contend “its local, organic and artisanal food is just window-dressing to help sell an ordinary industrial product jetted in from all over the world.” I hope they’ll keep up the pressure and move Whole Foods in an ever better direction. But in the end, I’m with the Telegraph writer who concludes:

[Founder and unsalaried CEO] John Mackey and his [well paid] team bring an idealism that is utterly alien to British supermarket culture. Yes, they are here to make money. But if they sometimes fall short of their stated ideals, they are genuinely trying to make the world a better place. If American customers are anything to go by, many of us will be persuaded.