Ideally, a columnist’s final commentary in December offers a story of hope and inspiration for the months and years to come.
I’m sure that’s what Whole Foods Market had in mind with the announcement earlier this month that the Austin, Texas-based natural foods grocery chain plans to create an Animal Compassion Foundation to “assist and inspire meat producers.”
Unfortunately, this seemingly noble gesture appears to be little more than a sugar-coated stunt to sidestep the ongoing challenge of humane livestock production. Once you get past the hot air involved in floating a hollow gesture past a gullible media that’s giving the firm a free pass, this foundation has about as much substance as one of those helium balloons that provide some little kid a momentary thrill but eventually drift away, out of sight and out of mind.
That’s my opinion, anyway. Here’s the story. You be the judge.
Whole Foods, which calls itself a “natural and organic foods supermarket,” plans to donate 5 percent of sales from its 166 stores on Jan. 25, 2005, to fund this new foundation. Based on annual reported sales of about $3.95 billion, that amounts to about $500,000, the proceeds of which would barely fund the people providing the publicity.
According to a company news release, since its “longstanding policy” of refusing to talk with trade magazine journalists precluded my questioning them directly, the foundation would be an independent, non-profit organization providing education and research services for livestock producers worldwide to achieve “a higher standard of animal welfare excellence while still maintaining economic viability.”
The release mentioned that two animal scientists, a Canadian and a Brit, and a handful of animal rights groups, none of whom are pledging any financial support, would be involved in “participatory meetings” to develop new humane guidelines for producers.
“We are pioneering an entirely new way for people to relate to farm animals,” claimed John Mackey, Whole Foods chairman, CEO and co-founder. “[M]any universities and organizations out there are doing research making production systems more productive and profitable, but there is no one place where meat producers can go to learn about making their processes more compassionate.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
For starters, it’s totally irresponsible to pretend livestock producers aren’t already actively involved in researching and promoting animal welfare. Let’s examine just a few key initiatives:
The National Pork Board’s $2.1 million checkoff-funded Swine Welfare Assurance Program, which offers producers a full-fledged systemized approach to better management of such production “hot spots” as gestation, proper handling and animal diseases — all from a humane standpoint. The Board also funds a full-time veterinarian to manage the program and focus solely on other related animal-welfare research.
The American Meat Institute’s Animal Handling Guidelines were created in 1991. AMI later developed comprehensive science-based GMPs for stunning, initiated an annual Animal Care and Handling Conference and launched the first-ever International Meat Animal Welfare Research Conference in 2003. That latter meeting brought together such leading animal scientists and welfare specialists as Temple Grandin, Janice Swanson, Ed Pajor, Mike Ellis and David Fraser, among half a dozen other top researchers.
The Food Marketing Institute and the National Council of Chain Restaurants, which jointly developed a meatpacking and poultry processing plant auditing system in conjunction with many of the same authorities cited above to ensure that state-of-the-art handling and welfare standards for livestock were independently audited and enforced among member grocery companies and foodservice operators.
Whole Foods management, in fact, uses the AMI Animal Handling Guidelines in its own auditing of meat and poultry packing plants, although they were among the last of the nation’s major food retailers to initiate such auditing.
It gets worse.
In its publicity, the company said its new foundation members would “search the planet for innovative animal compassionate ranchers and farmers whose methods can be studied.” I don’t know how much searching will get done on the budget they’ll have available, but I could spare them the journey.
There is already a group of producers such as they describe, and they’re already in business, and a number of them are already selling products carried at Whole Foods stores. These producers are paying participants in a program that offers a model of compassion and profitability: the Certified Humane program operated by the Humane Farm Animal Care organization.
Certified Humane has already developed a full-fledged animal welfare program covering all aspects of livestock production and handling. The organization not only collects annual dues from dozens of producers, but it is also provided significant financial support from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Humane Society of the United States, the latter organization being one of the participants Whole Foods said would help structure a new paradigm of livestock production.
Friends, that’s already been done. The Humane Farm Animal Care rules were developed over the course of many months by a veritable who’s who of animal scientists and welfare experts, and program participants must pass rigorous initial and annual inspections conducted by third-party auditors to qualify for use of the Certified Humane label on their products.
Which Whole Foods, for all its talk about wanting to offer shoppers more humanely produced foods, has balked at allowing to be displayed in its stores.
By any reasonable analysis, the company’s “solution” to the challenge of farm animal welfare is — at best — a reinvention of the wheel.
At worst, it’s a full-fledged PR scam of monumental proportions.
I’m voting for the latter scenario, because it fits with how Whole Foods has always tried to position itself: As the alternative to conventional supermarkets.
Like the organic industry with which Mackey long ago allied his operations, Whole Foods’ marketing message suggests that animal foods sold at conventional supermarkets come from livestock that are not raised humanely and that produce sold at competing stores is tainted with who-knows-what.
The implication is clear. Only by shopping at Whole Foods can you “feel good” about the foods you buy, whether from a food-safety or an animal welfare standpoint.
It’s a powerful position. Unfortunately, it’s based on a lie.
Livestock production in this country is at the most humane and evolved status that it’s ever been. If Mackey’s globe-trotting takes him anywhere outside of a handful of countries in Western Europe, he would recognize quickly that U.S. producers are among the most enlightened on Earth.
More importantly, whatever changes might be implemented in raising food animals would carry a price tag — for producers and for consumers. Mackey dodges that fact, stating in a recent interview with Grist magazine that, “The whole idea is to do both: The animals have to flourish, but in such a way that it’ll be cheap enough for the customers to buy it.”
That, I would argue, is exactly the system we currently have in place in the United States today, as opposed to the imagery evoked by Whole Foods that somewhere, somebody has reinvented production agriculture, and all that’s needed to revamp the $300 billion industry in North America is a couple of plane tickets.
To pretend that transformative change can be accomplished on a budget of chump change is disingenuous. And to make your customers pay for such a flight of fantasy, thinking they’re making life better for farm animals, is the height of arrogance.
Truth is, Whole Food’s marketing approach is barely removed from that of snake-oil salesmen, who fleeced consumers with promises of potions that — like organic foods — were likewise “guaranteed” to bring benefits conventional purveyors couldn’t possibly provide.
Like the suckers who got swindled in an earlier era, the promise that Whole Foods can reinvent animal husbandry and revamp food production depends on its customers swallowing the notion that conventional producers are inhumane, conventional foods are unhealthy and conventional retailers are corrupt.
The reality is that livestock production runs the gamut, from extremely conscientious to egregiously exploitative. But on balance, producers have little incentive to abuse the very source of their profitability — especially if you embrace the implication that, as a group, they’re motivated primarily by profit.
Could production agriculture be made more “humane?” That’s like asking, “Could cars be made safer?” Yes, if money were no object, farm animals could all live like pampered pets, and we’d all be tooling around in armored Humvees.
But money is involved — lots of it — in supporting the programs already in place to provide both conventional and alternative producers real-world models of raising livestock humanely and efficiently.
Whole Foods may have succeeded in sourcing “alternative” products that appeal to people’s better nature — affluent people, anyway.
But to pretend that a massive reinvention of meat production — even if that were needed — could also be accomplished with a “feel-good” foundation that doesn’t remotely have the necessary resources or revenues is the emptiest of the huckster’s promises: You can have societal change without having to pay for it.
That’s as phony as it gets.
Meating Place : Whole Foods’ Phony Foundation a Natural-Born Scam
Posted: December 31, 2004 by Certified Humane
Ideally, a columnist’s final commentary in December offers a story of hope and inspiration for the months and years to come.
I’m sure that’s what Whole Foods Market had in mind with the announcement earlier this month that the Austin, Texas-based natural foods grocery chain plans to create an Animal Compassion Foundation to “assist and inspire meat producers.”
Unfortunately, this seemingly noble gesture appears to be little more than a sugar-coated stunt to sidestep the ongoing challenge of humane livestock production. Once you get past the hot air involved in floating a hollow gesture past a gullible media that’s giving the firm a free pass, this foundation has about as much substance as one of those helium balloons that provide some little kid a momentary thrill but eventually drift away, out of sight and out of mind.
That’s my opinion, anyway. Here’s the story. You be the judge.
Whole Foods, which calls itself a “natural and organic foods supermarket,” plans to donate 5 percent of sales from its 166 stores on Jan. 25, 2005, to fund this new foundation. Based on annual reported sales of about $3.95 billion, that amounts to about $500,000, the proceeds of which would barely fund the people providing the publicity.
According to a company news release, since its “longstanding policy” of refusing to talk with trade magazine journalists precluded my questioning them directly, the foundation would be an independent, non-profit organization providing education and research services for livestock producers worldwide to achieve “a higher standard of animal welfare excellence while still maintaining economic viability.”
The release mentioned that two animal scientists, a Canadian and a Brit, and a handful of animal rights groups, none of whom are pledging any financial support, would be involved in “participatory meetings” to develop new humane guidelines for producers.
“We are pioneering an entirely new way for people to relate to farm animals,” claimed John Mackey, Whole Foods chairman, CEO and co-founder. “[M]any universities and organizations out there are doing research making production systems more productive and profitable, but there is no one place where meat producers can go to learn about making their processes more compassionate.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
For starters, it’s totally irresponsible to pretend livestock producers aren’t already actively involved in researching and promoting animal welfare. Let’s examine just a few key initiatives:
The National Pork Board’s $2.1 million checkoff-funded Swine Welfare Assurance Program, which offers producers a full-fledged systemized approach to better management of such production “hot spots” as gestation, proper handling and animal diseases — all from a humane standpoint. The Board also funds a full-time veterinarian to manage the program and focus solely on other related animal-welfare research.
The American Meat Institute’s Animal Handling Guidelines were created in 1991. AMI later developed comprehensive science-based GMPs for stunning, initiated an annual Animal Care and Handling Conference and launched the first-ever International Meat Animal Welfare Research Conference in 2003. That latter meeting brought together such leading animal scientists and welfare specialists as Temple Grandin, Janice Swanson, Ed Pajor, Mike Ellis and David Fraser, among half a dozen other top researchers.
The Food Marketing Institute and the National Council of Chain Restaurants, which jointly developed a meatpacking and poultry processing plant auditing system in conjunction with many of the same authorities cited above to ensure that state-of-the-art handling and welfare standards for livestock were independently audited and enforced among member grocery companies and foodservice operators.
Whole Foods management, in fact, uses the AMI Animal Handling Guidelines in its own auditing of meat and poultry packing plants, although they were among the last of the nation’s major food retailers to initiate such auditing.
It gets worse.
In its publicity, the company said its new foundation members would “search the planet for innovative animal compassionate ranchers and farmers whose methods can be studied.” I don’t know how much searching will get done on the budget they’ll have available, but I could spare them the journey.
There is already a group of producers such as they describe, and they’re already in business, and a number of them are already selling products carried at Whole Foods stores. These producers are paying participants in a program that offers a model of compassion and profitability: the Certified Humane program operated by the Humane Farm Animal Care organization.
Certified Humane has already developed a full-fledged animal welfare program covering all aspects of livestock production and handling. The organization not only collects annual dues from dozens of producers, but it is also provided significant financial support from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Humane Society of the United States, the latter organization being one of the participants Whole Foods said would help structure a new paradigm of livestock production.
Friends, that’s already been done. The Humane Farm Animal Care rules were developed over the course of many months by a veritable who’s who of animal scientists and welfare experts, and program participants must pass rigorous initial and annual inspections conducted by third-party auditors to qualify for use of the Certified Humane label on their products.
Which Whole Foods, for all its talk about wanting to offer shoppers more humanely produced foods, has balked at allowing to be displayed in its stores.
By any reasonable analysis, the company’s “solution” to the challenge of farm animal welfare is — at best — a reinvention of the wheel.
At worst, it’s a full-fledged PR scam of monumental proportions.
I’m voting for the latter scenario, because it fits with how Whole Foods has always tried to position itself: As the alternative to conventional supermarkets.
Like the organic industry with which Mackey long ago allied his operations, Whole Foods’ marketing message suggests that animal foods sold at conventional supermarkets come from livestock that are not raised humanely and that produce sold at competing stores is tainted with who-knows-what.
The implication is clear. Only by shopping at Whole Foods can you “feel good” about the foods you buy, whether from a food-safety or an animal welfare standpoint.
It’s a powerful position. Unfortunately, it’s based on a lie.
Livestock production in this country is at the most humane and evolved status that it’s ever been. If Mackey’s globe-trotting takes him anywhere outside of a handful of countries in Western Europe, he would recognize quickly that U.S. producers are among the most enlightened on Earth.
More importantly, whatever changes might be implemented in raising food animals would carry a price tag — for producers and for consumers. Mackey dodges that fact, stating in a recent interview with Grist magazine that, “The whole idea is to do both: The animals have to flourish, but in such a way that it’ll be cheap enough for the customers to buy it.”
That, I would argue, is exactly the system we currently have in place in the United States today, as opposed to the imagery evoked by Whole Foods that somewhere, somebody has reinvented production agriculture, and all that’s needed to revamp the $300 billion industry in North America is a couple of plane tickets.
To pretend that transformative change can be accomplished on a budget of chump change is disingenuous. And to make your customers pay for such a flight of fantasy, thinking they’re making life better for farm animals, is the height of arrogance.
Truth is, Whole Food’s marketing approach is barely removed from that of snake-oil salesmen, who fleeced consumers with promises of potions that — like organic foods — were likewise “guaranteed” to bring benefits conventional purveyors couldn’t possibly provide.
Like the suckers who got swindled in an earlier era, the promise that Whole Foods can reinvent animal husbandry and revamp food production depends on its customers swallowing the notion that conventional producers are inhumane, conventional foods are unhealthy and conventional retailers are corrupt.
The reality is that livestock production runs the gamut, from extremely conscientious to egregiously exploitative. But on balance, producers have little incentive to abuse the very source of their profitability — especially if you embrace the implication that, as a group, they’re motivated primarily by profit.
Could production agriculture be made more “humane?” That’s like asking, “Could cars be made safer?” Yes, if money were no object, farm animals could all live like pampered pets, and we’d all be tooling around in armored Humvees.
But money is involved — lots of it — in supporting the programs already in place to provide both conventional and alternative producers real-world models of raising livestock humanely and efficiently.
Whole Foods may have succeeded in sourcing “alternative” products that appeal to people’s better nature — affluent people, anyway.
But to pretend that a massive reinvention of meat production — even if that were needed — could also be accomplished with a “feel-good” foundation that doesn’t remotely have the necessary resources or revenues is the emptiest of the huckster’s promises: You can have societal change without having to pay for it.
That’s as phony as it gets.
Category: news