The Whole Foods blog
A call from Dominic Rushe of the Sunday Times who is writing about business blogging. I talked as plausibly as I could about what is going on in the UK, but in truth there has not yet been a lot of movement by corporates towards setting up blogs. I recently reviewed Suw Charman’s suggestions as to why. I am convinced it will happen, though it may take the word “blog” losing some of its negative and/or cranky overtones. For all of my excitement about David Weinberger’s vision of what blogging can do for society and for business, real benefits will come when people see blogging as a neutral technology, available to single issue campaigners, schoolkids, mothers, businessmen, musicians and marketeers equally.
I am indebted, though to Dominic for showing me this example (screen shot above) of a corporate blog, done by food company Whole Foods. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey clearly realised the huge threat to his brand from author Michael Pollan’s book the Omnivore’s dilemma
Pollan had not approached Whole Foods during the writing of the Omnivore’s Dilemma. In the book he criticised Whole Foods and compared it to Wal-Mart for, he said, failing to source locally. Wal-Mart is a cuss-word amongst liberal shoppers of exactly the kind that Whole Foods targets. Pollan’s is a grave allegation and one that resonates in articles like this from Field Maloney in Slate. Worse, Whole Foods makes large in-store claims for sourcing locally. Worse still, Wal-Mart itself recently announced that it was going organic, posing a huge threat to Whole Foods key differentiator.
Here is a taster of the exchange on Mackey’s blog. Pollan writes:
Let me start by explaining why I did not seek to interview anyone from Whole Foods for my book, which you imply in your letter represents a journalistic lapse. (You should know I have interviewed people from the company several times in the past, particularly in connection with an April 2001 story I did for The New York Times Magazine “Naturally,” for which I interviewed Margaret Wittenberg. Over the years I have also interviewed several store employees of Whole Foods and a great many of its suppliers.) For the purposes of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” I approached Whole Foods less as a journalist than a consumer, since my goal was to capture how the store represents itself and the food it sells to a typical shopper: the signs and displays, the brochures, the labels, the photographs on the walls. Admittedly, this is not a systematic way to describe a supermarket chain-it depends on the sample of stores I visited and what they happened to be selling on any given day. It could be you have stores that sell substantially more local food than the stores I observed. But the fact remains that what I observed I observed, and that is what I wrote in the book. Nothing in your letter leads me to believe my account of what you sell in my local Whole Foods or the farms it comes from is inaccurate.
Mackey’s response:
It is difficult to discuss this with you here, Michael, because you are falling back upon your own subjective experience as your only reference point. I want to point out, however, that we never merely “observe what we observe.” We bring to our observations our expectations, beliefs, biases, and world views, and these serve as perceptual filters that tremendously influence our observations. One of the main purposes of my letter to you was to try to get you to examine some of your biases and beliefs about Whole Foods Market that may be filtering what you are actually observing about us. If you come into our stores (or anywhere else) looking for what you don’t like, it is all-too-easy to find it.
With all due respect, Michael, I also think your response here is pretty weak because the fact is that you didn’t try to contact us. I think if you are going to criticize us publicly to hundreds of thousands of people and are going to compare us unfavorably with Wal-Mart, then you at least owe us the courtesy of talking to us first and hearing our side of the story. You certainly spent plenty of time talking directly to Joel Salatin for the book and didn’t approach him as simply an innocent “consumer.” Quite the opposite: you went and lived at his farm for about a week. That kind of first hand knowledge and experience is the essence of good journalism in my opinion and I think Whole Foods Market also deserved to be treated fairly and with respect.
John Mackey produced chapter and verse supporting his contention that Whole Foods indeed sourced produce locally. Pollan emerges a little battered from the exchange.
Mackey was absolutely right to use a blog as a forum for publishing his response and having this debate. Pollan’s book is exactly the kind of publication that bloggers love. Judging from posts like this Mackey seems to have made his point. He is commended for his transparency. He seems to have spiked the guns of those who were setting Whole Foods up to be a corporate villain in the organic foods arena.
