Wal-Mart is already the nation’s largest seller of groceries, but still, there’s something disconcerting about the recent news that it plans to introduce a wide range of organic food products beginning this summer. The problem is that when Wal-Mart enters a market, its basic approach is to squeeze suppliers to bring down prices. One of the big reasons farmers have switched to growing organic foods is that profit margins are higher than growing conventional produce. Once Wal-Mart gets through with them, they’ll just be selling another commodity. When suppliers get squeezed, they find ways to cut costs, and often quality.
Another disconnect in the Wal-Mart push into organics is that you know Wal-Mart cares not a bit about nutrition. So its suppliers will slap the word "organic" on everything containing ingredients grown without pesticides–including pasta, chips, carbonated drinks, and sweet children’s cereals. One of the big attractions of Whole Foods and its reliance on organic food was its refusal to allow Coke, Pepsi, Frito-Lay and Kellogg’s into its aisles because of their heavy use of sugar, artificial sweeteners and transfatty acids (even though Whole Foods over the years has become ever more lax in its standards).
A New York University nutritionist quoted in the NY Times story I linked to in the first paragraph stated that the Wal-Mart move represents "a ploy to be able to charge more for junk food." Ah, organic junk food…what a warm, fuzzy thought that is.
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