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If you are old enough to remember a time when googol was still just a silly math word, then you might also recall that organic food used to be laughably bad. The produce was gnarly and swarming with fruit flies, the bread was dark and dense, and chocolate? Carob was health food's closest approximation, and it was awful. Until the Organic Foods Production Act passed in 1990 and was fully implemented 12 years later, there were even different organic standards in different states. So, for example, you might find products side by side on the shelf that were marked as "California Organic" and "Colorado Organic," and they weren't the same.
Organic has obviously come a long way since then. Organic food is often better looking, better tasting, and arguably safer than its conventional counterparts, and the USDA Organic seal signifies a gold standard that is consistent from coast to coast.
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But recent retail program innovations have threatened to leave the popular perception of "organic" rent asunder, creating, in effect, a world in which there is "your organic" and "our organic."
First came the announcement in April that Walmart would start offering 100 organic packaged goods under the Wild Oats name—itself, one of the more divisive brands in natural foods history—for the same price as conventional foods, which is to say, 25 to 30% less than the price at natural foods supermarkets like Sprouts and Whole Foods. Some hailed this as the long-awaited democratization of organics, heralding a world in which healthier foods would be available to all and would not just serve as a badge of snooty suburban soccer mom superiority. Others worried that by artificially lowering the retail price of organic food, which has typically included some of the externalities of food production that are masked by the massive government subsidies paid to conventional farmers, Walmart was commoditizing organics—a scenario that could lead to supply shortages and a subsequent move toward large-scale industrial organic farms.
But Whole Foods and the yup-scale natural foods community didn't say a word. That's because they knew it posed no real competitive threat: Most Whole Foods customers would never deign to set foot inside a Walmart—much as the Walmart customers steer clear of the Lexus-laden parking lots of Whole Foods. The new low-priced Wild Oats products? Those are your organics. Clean foods for the great unwashed masses.
Even when Walmart announced a seemingly well-intentioned new sustainability initiative to reduce the environmental impact and increase the transparency of the sourcing for its food, to the organo-purists that was only further evidence of the divide. After all, the manufacturers backing Walmart in these efforts included Big Food "villains" like General Mills, PepsiCo, Cargill, and the ultimate symbol of your organics, Monsanto.
But then came the news that Whole Foods is going beyond organic, with a new rating system of its own that assesses each batch of produce for how "responsibly grown" it is—based not just on the USDA Organic standards, but also on the supplier's growing practices, such as the extent to which it protects the air, soil, water, human health, and bee population. Our organics, if you will. It's an ambitious and laudable system. But the practical implication is that there will now be signs indicating good, better, and best produce, at least at Whole Foods. And that may mean a return to the confusing days when organic meant different things to different people.
Except to the Walmart customers, since they will apparently never cross the demilitarized zone and visit a Whole Foods…
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Source: https://www.prevention.com/food-nutrition/healthy-eating/a20439257/different-organic-food-stores/
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