Whole Food Market: The Growth Of The Whole Foods Market

While the organic movement has increased the production and sale of organic food in the United States, something that should be noted is that the stock of Whole Foods Market, a grocery store is dedicated to the sale of organic food, has gone down 40% since October of 2013. Whole Foods Market’s success rates are slowly beginning to diminish and it may lose its dominance in the organic foods market (The Economist, 2014). While this may seem indicative of a decrease in public interest of organic food, it really indicates the opposite. After seeing the success of Whole Foods Market, new stores such as Trader Joe’s and Sprouts entered the organic market and became strong competition. The decline in Whole Foods Market’s success may be attributed

The organic movement began to become influenced by American corporations when organic agriculture became institutionalized (Johnston, Biro, & MacKendrick, 2009). The corporatization of organic food has influenced the movement by re-defining the word organic itself. Now that larger corporations need approval and certification of their products, the term organic has begun to shift from a word that was once loaded with environmental ideals to a simple label signifying that the products met the standards of the regulations set forth by the USDA. The increase of interest in larger corporations has also influenced the movement as it has caused certification processes to become more costly, so costly that smaller suppliers cannot manage and consequently get pushed out of the market. While the buy-outs by larger corporations may deter members of the organic movement from making purchases from their company, a lack advertisement may hide the fact that the smaller companies have been bought out especially as larger corporations keep the original name without publically announcing that they have bought out the company. In fact, in the “Lost in the Supermarket: The Corporate-Organic Foodscape and the Struggle for Food Democracy” study, it was reported that only 56% of corporations list their affiliation with the smaller organic company that they buy out. In order to maintain the guise of staying true to the origins of the organic movement, many corporations who have bought out smaller companies advertise to the public in a way that projects images of small and humble beginnings of family owned farms. In other words, though corporations use large scale farms in several different areas, they still portray their company in a light that depicts them as small, family farms—truly humanizing