Taste test: Wal-Mart vs. Whole Foods produce | Hacker News Reader

Taste test: Wal-Mart vs. Whole Foods produce

theatlantic.com

101 pointsrobg53 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

I went to the Wal-Mart in Mazatlan, MX and it seemed like a pretty nice store. Maybe just a little nicer than the ones in America but it seemed much nicer and better stocked than the other stores in the area.

A little tangential, but when in China I actively sought out McDonald's because their bathrooms were generally cleaner (and had TP) compared to the average establishments.

But I once got kicked out of the McD's just for taking a photo of a China-style McD's menu. Go figure.

I got yelled at for taking a picture of "The House That Waffle Built" in the Philippines -- standing on a sidewalk 200 feet away. I've also gotten yelled out for trying to take a picture of a shark fin in China Town in SF. Is there some cultural faux pas that I'm missing? Or am I just unlucky.

As a visitor in China for a couple of weeks, I also appreciated Walmart.

Low prices and no haggling.

Want to know a trick to haggling? Decide how much you're willing to pay for something, pull out the money and say "I'm willing to give you this. Otherwise I'm leaving." If they protest, walk away. If the seller can make money at that price, I guarantee you will get called back and you will end up having your purchase at your desired price very quickly.

At least, thus far, it's the most efficient haggling method I've found.

What do mean by this

Have a completely cold chain for its meat supply.

What's a "cold chain"? Does it control the meat from cow to selling it and therefore can control the safety?

It means the meat stays refrigerated all the way from slaughter to sale. The meat in all the other chains spends significant time sitting in areas without temperature control (read, sitting in hot areas).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_chain

I never buy meat at Wal-mart. They don't have any local butchers. The story I heard was that one store's meat cutters were attempting to unionize so Wal-mart fired all of it's meat cutters nationwide and consolidated it's meat cutting and now ships cuts of meat to individual stores.

Maybe it's because I live in the Midwest United States but, I like knowing there's a professional handling meat and someone I can speak with if I need a special cut or something that's not available.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fancy seeing another person from Bloomington, IN here!

I applaud Wal-mart for making local food more accessible. There are plenty of places that could use more cheap produce in their towns.

It's understandable that Bloomingfoods (the local organic grocery store) is so expensive since they are paying for the prime retail location space in town compared to Wal-Mart which is out in the county. You are paying for the luxury of walking or biking to their stores - Wal-mart is only accessible by Car or Bus. Trading convenience for price.

For a slightly different trade-off, there are about 40 or 50 people who just started buying in a food buying club once a month directly from the distributor that Bloomingfoods buys from (UNFI). They don't have much in the way of local fresh produce (we get that from the farmer's markets and CSAs), but the canned goods, bulk items and hosehold items are typically between 30-50% cheaper than Bloomingfoods and the pickup is right in town. If you are interested, let me know and I can get you the info.

Just wait until Wegmans comes to your area. They're fantastic, except for the fact that it takes an enormous number of customers to sort one, and so are usually surrounded by parking-lot oceans.

I think they must have bought some people over from ASDA in the UK - a chain they bought a while ago.

I used to go to Walmart in Texas every now and again and it was not a good experience. Now the ones I have been in are starting to pick up elements that look suspiciously like they were lifted from ASDA - especially the produce section. The local produce product line has been running for a while in the UK (both buy-British and buy-regional) for example.

It seemed odd at the time because the UK grocery market seems to be a pretty bad business to buy into with 4/5 large and reasonably evenly matched competitors that are so close to saturation point that nearly all areas are served by 2+ big and 3+ small stores.

(Equally the UK Walmart stores are getting more like the American ones in the non-food section.)

chicken breasts with no additives, no antibiotics or hormones, and that were fed a purely vegetarian diet

Not to quibble, but this is nothing to be proud of: chickens are omnivores and scarf down anything they can fit in their beaks.

Exactly! I cringe at vegetarian fed chicken and red meat, which usually means some type of corn. That stuff is impossible to avoid.

I've never had a bad shopping experience at Walmart, well not one that was within Walmart's control, but that's not really the reason most people dislike them. The real problem is on the supply side, Walmart is so massive that supplying them can make or break your company. So if getting a contract means your margins are razor thin you do it even if it may not be a very good long term strategy. People don't like Walmart because they squeeze everything out of their suppliers and then move on to a new supplier.

Now granted you could view this as the suppliers not being efficient or smart enough but in a non-Walmart monopoly world they would have easily survived.

Pretty good Fast Company article on their negotiation techniques: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html

im sorry, but are we assuming that suppliers are inherently worthy of business? if wal-mart is slowly squeezing out inefficient suppliers in favor of more efficient ones everyone is winning.

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.

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)

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.

Not to mention all the time you spent going from place to place.

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.

True, but (regardless of your stance on if drugs actually should be illegal or not) do we punish the drug dealers or the users harsher? In cases of exploiting a vice, the precedent is to punish the exploiter harsher than the exploitie. And in America unrealistically low prices seem to be more habit forming than heroin.

Not quite.

Hypothetical example: Initially a town has two shops A and B. A sells high-end goods at high-end prices. B sells low-end goods quite cheaply. Most people buy mostly from B but get their luxuries from A. Now Wal-Mart moves in. It sells low-end goods cheaper than B, and highish-end goods cheaper (but lower quality) than A. Some people are quality fanatics and continue to get their high-end goods from A, but most of A's customers care about convenience as well and therefore get Wal-Mart's highish-end goods there since they're buying their ordinary stuff there too. Result: A no longer gets enough custom to turn a profit and shuts down, and now everyone gets everything from Wal-Mart.

The low prices help, I'm sure, but I bet convenience matters more. (Single anecdotal datapoint: I am a very price-insensitive food buyer, but I get almost all my food from supermarkets simply because it's so much more convenient than going to lots of different shops, possibly discovering after buying half the ingredients for a meal that something important isn't available, etc. FWIW I'm not in the US, so it isn't Wal-Mart I'm buying from.)

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.

But not because of that.

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.

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.

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.

I don't believe this. Yes, short on average. But I doubt the nasty, brutish part. H-G burnt out. Farmer faded away. Overall I think there are pro/cons between types different societies: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/10/farmers-war.html

[-]http://iweb.tntech.edu/kosburn/history-444/birth_of_war.htm

In an ideal world perfectly healthy and tasty food would materialize in front of us whenever we were hungry :)

In an ideal world sentences are never the most intelligent ones. Being able to directly get food from those who produce it removes some obstacles (like maintaining the technology for safe distribution) but adds others. For one ecnonomies of scale won't come to play. And I would think that's a rather big thing. At least if we want to maintain the status quo. I don't know whether feeding seven billion people with local food is possible. I don't think it is.

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.

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.

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.

Same here in South Carolina.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.)

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

"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.

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...

I love the term 'greenwashing'.

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

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