Whole Foods // Current TV

WHOLE FOODS: Don't Fire Employees for being Muslim

Glenn returned from his pilgrimage and found that he had been demoted to seasonal... more

LOrion
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Smart and Funny Political News Satire: What's Next? Bachmann/Palin Jello Wrestling? Ironic News Report, Sept. 12, 2011

The Ironic News Report is a satirical news parody that skewers politics and current... more

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Bethenny Frankel Gets The BOOT From Whole Foods

Talk about a huge blow to your "empire".... this one is gonna sting for... more

NikkiLeigh
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5 months ago
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Music Video: Whole Foods Parking Lot (VIDEO)

Yo its about to get REAL in the Whole Foods parking lot man...

dryeraser
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8 months ago
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Andronico’s: The Foodie’s Grocery Store

I've always said that some day I want to have a job where I can make enough money... more

Eric_Kauschen
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10 months ago
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Mobile technology connects sustainability-conscious consumers with local growers

By downloading ShopSavvy, a free smartphone application, consumers can scan the GS1... more

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10 months ago
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Whole Foods Adopts Transparent Animal Welfare Ratings

This summer I’ll celebrate a decade of being vegetarian (yeah, I’m getting old). Being a veggie isn’t always easy, and I can’t say I haven’t cheated on occasion (for some reason, I really craved buffalo wings when I first started), but year after year the cause has stayed important to me.

But this post isn’t about me; it’s about Whole Foods’ new animal welfare ratings. Last month, the world's largest retailer of natural and organic foods announced the launch of the 5-Step Animal Welfare Rating Standards, a new labeling system designed to educate consumers on the living conditions of the meat (pigs, chickens and cattle) they eat.

What does it all mean? The ratings are determined by independent third-party certifiers using auditors trained by the Global Animal Partnership (GAP). Essentially, the higher the step, the better the conditions for the animal. Step 1 equals “no crates, no cages,” meaning the “animals live their lives with space to move around and stretch their legs.” Step 5+ means the animal has enjoyed Step 1-5, including a “pasture-centered” life and living only on one farm.

Though organizations like PETA have been remarkably silent, others have questioned the transparency of these standards, including Certified Humane which compares GAP with other ratings available to Whole Foods. To be fair, Certified Humane offers a competitive rating system to GAP’s so it’s bound to be pushing for the use of its standards, but some of the issues it raises are worth noting. Even at Step 5+, the best rating, GAP does not have standards for slaughtering, does not guarantee animals are allowed dark/sleep periods and does not ensure animals receive disease prevention health care.

Compassion is the number one reason I choose to avoid meat, and, as of 2003, 96% of Americans agree animals deserve "some" protection from harm and exploitation. While I would love to see greater transparency in Whole Foods’ current initiative and a shift from publicizing humane treatment to requiring it across its supply chain, I appreciate the operational challenges that must exist and personally applaud the company for taking this important first step.

In the meantime, I’m eager for Whole Foods to apply these standards to other animal products and bi-products and look forward to a day when Whole Foods expands the program to include Step 6: No animal life was sacrificed to produce this product.

http://www.coneinc.com/whole-foods-adopts-animal-welfare-ratingsThis summer I’ll celebrate a decade of being vegetarian (yeah, I’m getting... more

3BLMedia
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11 months ago
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Global Animal Partnership formed to implement animal welfare standards

"After our founding in 2008, we took on the challenge of revising and expanding... more

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12 months ago
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Stonyfield Says: "OCA’s letter is blatantly untrue".

Stonyfield says: "The Organic Consumers Association distributed an inaccurate,... more

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1 year ago
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The Organic Elite Surrenders to Monsanto: What Now?

"The policy set for GE alfalfa will most likely guide policies for other GE crops... more

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American Consumers Are Willing to Drive Out of Their Way (Literally) For Cause-Marketing Products

Since its inception, Whole Foods has become a symbol of sustainable agriculture, the highest industry standards, and the place to buy “the finest natural and organic foods available,” according to their web site. Due in part to its commitment to such causes, Whole Foods is also notoriously expensive. Yet the company’s continued success is a case-in-point of America’s willingness to pay more for what it perceives as a good cause. But what if there isn’t one near by? Will consumers still stay loyal to the cause it they have to drive further to support it? The current available data from a variety of institutions does not address to what extent does a consumer’s loyalty to a place like Whole Foods goes, until now.

Part of Do Well Do Good, LLC ‘s new study focuses on issues of consumer behavior and commitment to cause-marketing and corporate social responsibility. The report will be released on December 15 on this web page.

Congruent with the results of other extant surveys, ours confirmed that roughly 70% of consumers were willing to pay more for a product that supports a cause. While in our previous release we revealed some data on how much extra money consumers are willing to spend to support a cause they care about, this time we asked to what extent are they willing to travel to support a cause.

To return to the example Whole Foods, what if there isn’t one near by? Are people willing to travel to by agriculturally sustainable products (or to stay loyal to another cause or brand)? If so, how far? Here is a preliminary look at the results:

Overall, roughly 69% of consumers are willing to drive some extra amount of time to purchase a product that supports a cause he or she cares about. While most demographics fell within the margin of error, only moms were outside of it, with 73% of mom-respondents willing to drive for an extra amount of time.

More specifically, on average:
American consumers would be willing to travel 10.89 minutes out of their way to drive to a specific store to purchase a cause product that supports a cause they care about
Men would be willing to travel 11.35 minutes
Women would be willing to travel 10.43 minutes and moms would travel 10.92 minutes
While more moms may be willing to drive an extra amount of time, men were willing to drive farther to buy a product that supports a cause, averaging of almost 11.5 minutes.
Interested in finding out more? Click on this link to be brought to the 2010 survey’s main page. If you’re reading this prior to its official release, you can obtain early access by signing up for our SPAM-free electronic newsletter in the field to the right of this article.

http://3blmedia.com/theCSRfeed/American-Consumers-Willing-Drive-Out-Their-Way-Literally-Cause-Marketing-ProductSince its inception, Whole Foods has become a symbol of sustainable agriculture, the... more

3BLMedia
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1 year ago
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The Weekly Pulse: Michael Pollan’s Rules for Thanksgiving, Plus Whole Foods’ Healthcare Lies

Editor’s Note: Happy Thanksgiving from the Media Consortium! This week, we aren’t stopping The Audit, The Pulse, The Diaspora, or The Mulch, but we are taking a bit of a break. Expect shorter blog posts, and The Diaspora and The Mulch will be posted on Wednesday afternoon, instead of their usual Thursday and Friday postings. We’ll return to our normal schedule next week.

by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger

Wednesday is the heaviest travel day of the year in the United States, as millions of Americans head home to celebrate Thanksgiving. Some of you are probably reading this dispatch on PDAs as you wait in an interminable line at airport security. Here’s some food for thought.

At Grist, food writer Michael Pollan officially declares himself a Rules Guy. Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean he won’t accept a Friday dinner invitation offered after noon on Wednesday. Pollan thinks that our healthy eating skills are passed down to us as part of food culture. In this era of drive-through windows and meal replacement bars, a lot of the old wisdom is falling by the wayside and Americans are finding themselves adrift in a sea of calories. On the eve of Thanksgiving, Pollan provides some helpful guidelines for avoiding the food coma:

[M]any ethnic traditions have their own memorable expressions for what amounts to the same recommendation. Many cultures, for examples, have grappled with the problem of food abundance and come up with different ways of proposing we stop eating before we’re completely full: the Japanese say “hara hachi bu” (“Eat until you are 4/5 full”); Germans advise eaters to “tie off the sack before it’s full.” And the prophet Mohammed recommended that a full belly should contain one-third food, one-third drink, and one-third air. My own Russian-Jewish grandfather used to say at the end of every meal, “I always like to leave the table a little bit hungry.”

But wait, there’s more!

* Unions representing airline pilots and flight attendants are advising their members to avoid the the TSA’s new backscatter x-ray scans because of concerns about the long-term health effects of x-ray radiation. Crew members who refused scans have been subjected to new “enhanced” pat-down searches. This week, the TSA granted an exception to pilots, but not to flight attendants. As I reported for Working In These Times, all crew members go through the same FBI background check and fingerprinting process. “Don’t touch my junk!” has become a rallying cry for passengers, particularly white men, who are not accustomed to being asked to give up any part of their body’s autonomy for the greater good. Is it a coincidence that 95% of pilots are men and three-quarters of flight attendants are women? [Update: The TSA has relented. The agency announced Tuesday that flight attendants will now get the same exemption as pilots.]

* Adam Serwer argues in The American Prospect that it’s easy to demand tough security measures when the presumed targets are faceless Muslims in a distant country. When air travelers are asked to compromise their own privacy in the name of security, the tradeoff suddenly seems very different.

* Employee health insurance deductibles are skyrocketing at Whole Foods and CEO John Mackey is trying to blame the increase on health care reform. “This is very important for everyone to understand: 100% of the increases in deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums in 2011 compared to 2010 are due to new federal mandates and regulations,” Mackey wrote in a corporate memo. In fact, as Josh Harkinson reports in Mother Jones, Mackey’s memo is pure, organic BS. The provisions in the Affordable Care Act that might increase costs won’t go into effect until 2014, so it’s hard to figure out how federal policies could be responsible. Health insurance costs were rising by about 5% per year, year after year, before the Affordable Care Act passed. The truth is that health insurance is getting more expensive because health care is getting more expensive. As Harkinson points out, one of the reasons that health care is getting more expensive is because corporations like Whole Foods are pushing more of their employees into part-time work to avoid covering them. Of course, when those workers get sick, someone has to pick up the cost of their care. So those who have insurance, including some of Whole Foods’ own employees, have to pay more to make up the difference.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.Editor’s Note: Happy Thanksgiving from the Media Consortium! This week, we... more

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Long Island Grocery Store Report Card Lists 3 Failures

The Citizens Campaign for the Environment (CCE) released the report Thursday, which... more

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1 year ago
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The Associated Press: Fermented tea kombucha vanishes on alcohol worries

Since last month, the government has been testing kombucha to determine if it should... more

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1 year ago
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top 5 current discussions: CA marijuana legalization, ladybugs on strike, mcdonalds density, immigration reform via community, mackey sneak attack at whole foods

It's Monday, and while the wheels are slowly starting to pick up steam, here are... more

mario_a
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1 year ago
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The great grocery smackdown!! Will Walmart, not Whole Foods, save small farms and make U.S. healthy?

Well, this is quite an idea if you really think about it. The mega box store (Wal... more

GreenNewEarth
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1 year ago
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Opera In The Supermarket Aisles

There was romance among the rutabagas this afternoon in the Whole Foods grocery store,... more

slagface
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1 year ago
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Hanging the Greenwash Out to Dry

It’s not always the usual suspects making headlines for good “green”... more

fordlyn
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1 year ago
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New food documentary asks, “Can whole foods and a plant-based diet save your life?” (video)

"The rise in popularity of environmental food documentaries, such as Food Inc.... more

CLGreen
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1 year ago
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Whole Foods Finds Way To Make Overweight Folk Feel Even More Self-Conscious

Whole Foods is offering bigger discounts -- from the current 20 percent to 30 percent... more

bundlebear
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2 years ago
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