Thursday, February 22, 2007
Food & Drink / Food Chain Whole swallows Wild
Posted by Elizabeth Tamny on 02.22.07 at 11:05 AM
Whole Oats? Wild Foods? Whole Foods (2006 sales:$5.6 bill) is buying smaller competitor Wild Oats for $565 million, a move that will allow the company to "compete better with larger traditional grocers" at a time when their rate of sales growth has slowed in the face of increased competition from more organic, natural products from stores like Trader Joe's, Safeway, and WalMart. Whole Foods also plans on cutting prices "on some products"; these decisions, according to the article's talking investment head, are not moves "being made from a position of strength," although stock prices are up. Whole Foods is based in Austin, Texas; Wild Oats in Boulder, Colorado.
Sure makes you think about the idea of eating local, not organic; it takes a lot of 365-brand tortilla chips to float constant double-digit sales growth. It also makes me suddenly think about the one-off "old-fashioned" health food stores of my youth, which someone mentioned the other day. Remember those? Remember that health food store smell? A kind of musty, carob-y, waxy, sweet, alfalfa haze . . . the columns of Dr. Bronner's near the front, bulk foods tipped loudly into paper bags, my disappointment when the sunflower seeds--when nothing--had any salt on them ... Sorry, way-back machine--yes, who would have guessed then?
Comments (6)
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If you're interested in some Whole Foods haterade, Slate weighed in on them: http://www.slate.com/id/2138176/ The guy who runs it can be reasonably described as a hippie libertarian, emphasis on the latter. He threw down with CEO of Cypress Semiconductor and Milton Friedman (!) in Reason: http://www.reason.com/news/show/32239.html
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It'll be particularly interesting to see what happens in Evanston, where both Whole Foods and Wild Oats have stores.
I just saw a TV ad for the "O" organics Safeway line at Dominicks..."you've got a beautiful naaaature," goes the jingle. What a trip. http://shop.safeway.com/corporate/safeway/o_organics_main.asp
I have really wanted to explore eating local, but found it impossible to grow coffee in my backyard in the middle of Kentucky. I am sad at the merger, I much prefer Wild Oats to Whole Foods. I prefer our local Good Foods Co-Op to either of them, but I think this will drive me to them even more often.
