
Taste test: Wal-Mart vs. Whole Foods produce - robg
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201003/walmart-local-produce
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garply
I absolutely love Walmart.

I live in China. Walmart is by far the most hygienic grocery store here.
Everybody attacks Walmart for its size and for running small players out of
business. But you know what that economy of scale allows it to do? Have a
completely cold chain for its meat supply. No other grocery chain (both
indigenous ones and other international chains like Carrefour) in China can do
that because the costs for them would be too expensive and they would lose
money.

So Walmart significantly raises the bar for meat safety in a country of 1.3
billion.

~~~
noodle
i've heard from people who've been to walmarts in china and america that
walmarts in china are nicer than the ones in america and are marketed as
relatively higher-scale than how they're marketed in america.

i'd take that with a grain of salt, though.

~~~
garply
No, their quality of service is about the same (although, like McDonald's and
Pizza Hut, they are upscale here, simply because of the different average
economic level of a consumer). But the cold chain thing is real - my business
partner was a consultant for a major retail chain and got access to all the
interesting info about the market.

~~~
noodle
interesting. perhaps that was the idea he was trying to convey, then. or that
the same store is perceived differently, from the relative consumer's
standpoint.

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czstrong
I recently went to Wal-Mart for the first time in Bloomington, IN, where I go
to school. It's a bit of a drive but we decided to make the trip to save some
money on household items. It was one of the bigger Wal-Marts I've seen and it
looked fairly new. As we were leaving we decided to check out the supermarket
section. Boy were we surprised.

The selection of fresh produce was about twice the size of what you could find
at the local Kroger and even better than our local organic grocery store that
gets its food from local farmers. They had a wide variety of fruits and
vegetables and they were presented very nicely. We found pre-packaged chicken
breasts with no additives, no antibiotics or hormones, and that were fed a
purely vegetarian diet; they were quite tasty and pretty cheap. The store was
very clean and bright and it was a fairly pleasant experience to shop there. I
like to eat things that are good for me and I usually don't mind spending more
for them, but after my experience in the store and now after knowing that some
of that produce has come from local farms, I think I will be doing a lot more
of my grocery shopping at Wal-Mart.

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ajross
_The selection of fresh produce was [...] even better than our local organic
grocery store that gets its food from local farmers._

Not sure why that would be surprising. Buying from local farmers inherently
means limiting yourself to local crops. So for example no southern hemisphere
crops in the off season, no tropical crops of any kind, etc... Expanding one's
options to be able to fly stuff in from anywhere in the world is always going
to improve selection.

The complaints about non-local food are about things like sustainability,
pesticide regulation, energy budget, etc... No one sane claims it doesn't
taste good.

~~~
kiddo
Actually, a lot of people complain that non-local food doesn't taste good.
Local food is usually picked closer to being ripe and usually arrives in the
store or market sooner after being picked. For both of these reasons it should
taste better.

~~~
ajross
Obviously depends on crop and circumstance. What you say is often true. That
said: if it's early spring and I have the choice between an Oregon-grown apple
and a flown-in New Zealand Fuji (or Chilean/Peruvian asparagus, often
available and yummy during the winter), there's really no contest.

Does that make it "good" to eat the airborne food? Certainly not by many
measures. But you can't just pretend that "local == better" if you want to win
arguments either.

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gchucky
Really interesting article, and kinda scary. Part of me wonders if we'll start
to see small local farms having to ramp up productivity to sell to Wal-Mart
and how that will affect the farms. It could end up going the way that
"industrial organic" has, like Michael Pollan describes in _Omnivore's
Dilemma_.

I do think, though, that there is some point where you have to weigh business
practices against each other. Wal-Mart may be doing good by supporting local
farms and bringing fresh produce to underprivileged areas, but they also
decimate town economies by opening up stores and destroying the competition -
not to mention how horribly they treat their workers. I've never been in a
Wal-Mart (there are none around here anyway) and the local farmers market is
excellent so it's not a concern for me, but other people might want to weigh
their options before deciding where to shop.

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notirk
Wal-Mart doesn't destroy local businesses or stores. Consumers who choose to
shop at the local Wal-Mart instead of their local businesses destroy the local
stores. Consumers' obsession with price, and price alone, over everything,
including quality of goods, and service, is what kills small stores.

And that's exactly why you won't find me at a Wal-Mart (and living in NYC,
there aren't any here...yet)

~~~
smokey_the_bear
It's really not just price. One day when I was living in the middle of San
Francisco I needed a ordinary paper hole punch. An item I remembered as being
relatively common. I walked down Haight street and tried the stationary store,
the art store, the hardware store, walgreens, and the salvation army. The
salvation army had a three hole punch, no one else had any paper punchers. I
ended up spending $20 to get a device designed to punch holes in metal or
something the hardware store. I really wished for a walmart that day.

~~~
johnwatson11218
This is so true. I experienced this living in both NYC and San Francisco. They
say NYC is so great because its "the city that never sleeps" etc. Well one
night I was painting my apartment and needed a hammer at around midnight.
There was no way I would have gotten that. Now I live in Phoenix and I go to
Wal-Mart at 11:00 PM about once a week. I love it, I don't ever want to live
in a place without Wal-Mart ever again.

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philk
_In an ideal world, people would buy their food directly from the people who
grew or caught it, or grow and catch it themselves._

We already had that world, and life was nasty, brutish and short.

~~~
mattmaroon
But not because of that.

~~~
natrius
I'd say it was indirectly because of that. Economies of scale have made
growing food far easier and cheaper, which allowed humans to spend time on
other things, like discovering penicillin. We could probably go back to buying
food directly from the people who grew/raised it without sacrificing much of
our current quality of life, but the money we'd spend on that would've been
spent on advancements in other areas of life. At this point, such a shift
would probably be a net positive in terms of improving health in the near
term.

~~~
derobert
No, going back to buying directly from the producer is horribly inefficient.
Consider just the additional travel required between:

(a) Each producer sells their goods to a central location (say, your local
Walmart). Each consumer goes to the central location to purchase goods.

(b) Each consumer goes to each producer he/she needs goods from and purchases
those goods directly.

(c) Each producer goes to a central location (e.g., a farmer's market) and
directly sells his/her goods there to each consumer.

Scenario (a) is closer to current practice (it is missing many more levels of
aggregation). You're proposing something like (b) or (c), as far as I can
tell.

Hypothetically, assume you want to have milk, eggs, toast w/ jam, and apple
for breakfast.

In (b), you wind up making several trips: one dairy farm, one chicken farm,
one bakery, one orchard, and maybe one more for the jam. This multiplies by
number of consumers. Also, farms are fairly distant from population centers,
so this is a good deal of driving!

In (c), you only make one trip, but the problem winds up being on the other
side. Each producer needs to drive all the way from the farm to each farmer's
market and spend all day there. You wind up with number of producers times
number of markets, and still a fair bit of driving (though nowhere near as bad
as b!)

We haven't even considered the difference between growing produce in CA and
shipping it in bulk vs. growing it in a heated greenhouse locally. Otherwise
you're giving up a lot of wealth by having very limited selection during the
cold months (or driving the CA to deal directly).

Nor have we considered other transaction costs of having to deal with many
more vendors. For example, if you think of a checkout aisle, there are
variable time sinks (vary basically linearly w/ number of items) and there are
fixed time sinks (same for any number of items, e.g., credit card processing
time). Those fixed time ones are going to be a problem.

Directly dealing with producers just doesn't scale.

It turns out that fuel and time is a actually pretty expensive, so every part
of the supply chain is very efficient.

~~~
natrius
I agree. Smaller scale agriculture seems like it might result in better
health, but directly purchasing the goods from producers isn't necessary for
that.

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RK
I do most of my grocery shopping at Walmart and Trader Joe's. The contrast
between apparent levels of wealth and physical fitness of the customers is
striking, to say the least.

I like going to Walmart for several reasons. One big one is that I end up
going shopping a lot at 1 or 2 am and the local Walmart is open 24/7.
Obviously, Walmart offers lower prices on many of its items, but I also like
to marvel at the shear scale of the operation and logistics.

As far as produce, I've always found that it is very hit or miss no matter
where you go, when it comes to flavor. Few brands/stores manage to maintain
taste consistently, although the appearance of the produce might be
consistently good.

There is also a Whole Foods near me but I try to avoid it. It has ridiculously
high prices and I cringe whenever I pass their "alternative health products"
isle.

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wglb
Fascinating article about local produce at Walmart. There is a hint in this
effort that the effect of this may include a little competition of sorts with
the Big Ag industry, at least at the level of competition for farmer's
attention.

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nroach
I think the applicability of the article depends on your local Walmart.
Perhaps in Boston you get local, sustainable, produce. But where I live in
Texas, even the newest Walmarts still only stock the plasticized Mexican and
Chilean produce, Chinese seafood, and red-dyed beef. YMMV.

~~~
RavingGoat
Same here in South Carolina.

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justinph
So they compare one mega-corp food outlet to an even bigger mega-corp food
outlet? WalMart is built having a better supply chain than anyone else. They
can buy the same stuff as whole foods, for less, because they buy more and
have the best distribution system around.

How about comparing WalMart to your local food Co-Op or a famers market. Or
focus on eating things that are actually in season and locally sourced. If you
start looking at the carbon impact of your food, that's one WalMart and Whole
foods will lose every day.

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uuilly
I've been buying organic produce for years and it definitely doesn't taste as
good as non-organic produce. An organic banana is about half the size of a non
organic banana, it is more mealy and it does not taste nearly as good. But if
I bought food on taste alone I would live on Ben and Jerry's. I know the
definitions of "Organic" are full of loopholes but I generally think that
whatever they did to make the banana twice as big and twice as tasty is
probably not good for me.

~~~
darshan
That's weird. Bananas are one of the few foods I buy organic -- specifically
because they're bigger and tastier than the non-organic ones.

My guess is that the fact that the organic bananas you have access to are
small and mealy has nothing to do with them being organic. Your store must
just get their organic and non-organic bananas from totally different places,
and the organic ones just happen to suck.

~~~
uuilly
I've lived in 3 different cities and shopped at many different stores. The
Chiquita bananas that claim to be organic are huge and look exactly like the
non-organic ones. I've always thought they were probably stretching the
definition of organic so I've avoided those ones.

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Groxx
Wal-mart fills a very-much-needed niche. Volume. Where volume is key, Wal-mart
fills the bill very well. And I like garply's comment, it shows what they're
really good at and good _for_.

The newer local-foods focus is fantastic, but they really do have a "if we
don't have it, you don't need it" style to the stores, and all they tend to
have is mid-low-grade everything. In my experience, that ends up costing you
_more_ in the long run, even ignoring the huge amount of added frustration and
just counting the cash.

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peterb
An interesting article. Unfortunately the results are biased unless they are
double blind tests.

~~~
sp332
The tests were not necessarily biased, it's just less certain that they were
fair. (Double-blind tests can also be biased, it's neither necessary nor
sufficient for fairness.)

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Evgeny
_The Walmart almonds were described as aromatic, mellow, pure, and yummy, the
Whole Foods almonds as raw, though also more natural; they were in fact
fresher, though duller in flavor._

LaLanne said his two simple rules of nutrition are: "if man made it, don't eat
it", and _"if it tastes good, spit it out"_

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_LaLanne>

~~~
drats
"if it tastes good, spit it out"

I am always glad when loonies reveal themselves easily and I don't need to pay
them any more attention. What complete bollocks.

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hristov
By the way this is from the Atlantic which has a long standing practice of
taking money from parties they write about in order to sponsor "discussions"
about subjects that they write about.

[http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/07/not_just_w...](http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/07/not_just_wapo_atlantics_corporate-
sponsored_salons.php?ref=fpb)

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johnyzee
I love the term 'greenwashing'.

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howcool
If I hear "praDuce" one more time, pronounced with a Boston accent, I'm gonna
have a seizure

