Whole Foods’ store-brand chickens are nearly the same as other stores — except for the sticker price
Biggest difference between store-brand poultry and other markets is usually just the price
Whole Foods Market doesn’t sell just chickens. It sells shoppers on the idea of chickens raised and treated better than prevailing standards: no antibiotics, no hormones, no cages. Not the sort of chicken you can get anywhere.
But thanks in no small part to a food-quality revolution that Whole Foods helped cultivate over the past decade, standards for much of the poultry sold at American supermarkets are shifting. The gulf has narrowedand sometimes has even closed between what’s sold at Whole Foods and what’s produced by industrial food giants such as Perdue Farms and sold at lowercost supermarkets.
Now that Amazon has moved to acquire Whole Foods for $13.7 billion, it remains to be seen what the online-shopping giant will do with the grocery chain that arguably did more than any business to bring the fussy foodie focus on provenance into the mainstream. The more widespread availability of products meeting Whole Foods standards can even be seen as part of what made the company vulnerable to a takeover bid.
The biggest difference between the store-brand chickens at Whole Foods and what’s for sale at another supermarket is, in many cases, the sticker price itself.
A shopper on a recent visit could pay $2.49 per pound for antibiotic-free thighs with a Whole Foods label touting “no added solutions or injections.” Perdue’s Harvestland-branded poultry-no antibiotics, airchilled-cost just $1.99 per pound at an unremarkable Key Food supermarket just a few blocks away. The similarities don’t stop there: In this case, the chicken under the 365 Everyday Value store-brand label at Whole Foods was raised by a Perdue farmer and slaughtered in the same Perdue plant as its Harvestland cousin, although a shopper likely wouldn’t be aware of that fact.
Not all 365-branded chicken comes from Perdue, and aside from an establishment number printed on the package, there is no way to determine where a product originated. Yet the price disparity for poultry of nearly indistinguishable origins can be pronounced. A whole bird under the 365 store brand at the same Whole Foods: $4.09 per pound. At Key Food, the Perdue Harvestland whole chicken: $1.99 per pound. (The quirks of grocery pricing can lead to unexpected results: Whole Foods store-brand drumsticks produced by Perdue rang up at 20 cents less per pound than Perdue’s Harvestland version.)
“What used to be more unique” to natural food retailers “has now become really par for the course, certainly among your larger chains and your progressive grocers,” says David Sprinkle, researcher director at Packaged Facts, a market-research firm. “When other chains, including bigger chains, started doing natural and organic, well, then suddenly Whole Foods was competing with Kroger, Wegmans, Costco.”
Several big poultry producers have acquired or formed partnerships with brands carried by Whole Foods; in some cases these companies have developed lines that accord with the practices used by Whole Foods. Perdue, for instance, acquired the no-antibiotics Coleman Natural Foods in 2011 and has since converted 95 percent of its poultry operations to antibiotic-free production. Poultry sold to Whole Foods is segregated from the rest of its lines.
Other standards that Whole Foods helped champion are becoming, well, standard. A practice such as air-chilling the chickens after slaughter — a step favored by chefs over a water — is used on Perdue poultry sold at Whole Foods and elsewhere. Other practices have been longtime standards. The use of synthetic hormones is not approved for U.S. poultry production, meaning that all chicken sold in supermarkets eligible for the hormone-free designation and broiler chickens are almost never raised in cages.
And no matter if a bird’s destiny is underneath a Whole Foods 365 label or Perdue’s own Harvestland brand, in many cases the slaughtering and processing happens in the same facility, which can be identified by the establishment number printed on the packaging. That means the same methods used to produce GAP-approved poultry for Whole Foods now extend well beyond what’s sold at Whole Foods.
At a Whole Foods with a meat counter, there will be a range of beef options behind the case clearly marked as local or grassfed. As with poultry, the products are all GAP-certified and follow the five-step rating system that requires a minimum of space per animal, pasture access, and a prohibition on branding. And, much like the poultry, customers at the meat counter would be unlikely to know that brand-free beef under the glass may come from two companies whose products are available through lower-cost vendors: Meyer Natural Angus and Open Prairie.
Both producers adhere to the required standards, even if shoppers are not aware of the connection to major beef companies. Meyer Natural Angus is processed in a Cargill plant in Colorado; Open Prairie is a Tyson brand. It’s more difficult to reliably compare beef prices at Whole Foods and other grocers because there are so many different cuts and availability can vary by location.
Meyer operates by sourcing GAP-certified animals and having them processed at a Cargill facility for a fee, then shipping to Whole Foods distribution centers. The company’s use of Cargill facilities is not abnormal, according to industry experts, and segregation practices are strictly monitored by representatives of both companies and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
There’s something else Whole Foods believes it offers: peace of mind. Sure, shoppers at Whole Foods can select and pay extra for a pasture-raised chicken or grass-fed steak from a local rancher. But even the least-expensive option will meet a basic promise of quality and transparency. “All products meet the same minimum standards. You don’t have to read the labels,” Weening says. In other stores, however, “the customer really has to search.”
Perhaps this is what resonates with the core customers at Whole Foods. Regardless of minor differences in provenance for some meat and poultry, the organic-food grocer has built its brand on the promise of healthful food and higher-quality products. The company has the ability to “leverage quite a bit of consumer trust,” says Billy Roberts, a senior food and drink analyst at Mintel, a market intelligence agency.
Theo Weening, the Whole Foods meat buyer, recognizes that as his company has demanded better products, it’s often the bigger, more widely available companies that have risen to supply them. “If you asked me 10 years ago, ‘Will you ever have a lot of Perdue chicken in your stores,’ I would have said, ‘No, probably not,’ ” he says. But, he adds, this only furthers the mission: “First it starts with Whole Foods, and then it changes the way animals are raised across the world.”
Whole Foods seems to be succeeding by that measure. While that might mean the company is fostering the growth of its own competition, one group is certain to benefit from more widely available products that meet higher standards: meat-eating shoppers.