"I call it the ripple effect," adds Scowcroft. "Every time a Whole
Foods store opens, every individual store - from the mom-and-pop to
the large chain - has got to address its own organic shelf."
That ripple looks more like a wave to the once small organic-food
industry. And organic farmers have been quick to catch it as they
push the transition of organic farming, from a small stake on the
fringe of the major farming operations in the country 20 years ago
to a mainstream player in its own right.
"Whole Foods demonstrated that there was a real market for organic
produce," says
James Parker, retail coordinator for Whole Foods'
national purchasing office in Watsonville,
California. "A lot of
farmers were reluctant to make the plunge, afraid they didn't have
a market for it, that they couldn't produce enough at a high-enough
quality standard to sell in the marketplace. We helped convince
them they could."
"It's been huge," agrees Jeff Huckaby, general manager of Grimmway
Farms' organic division. With Whole Foods' help, Grimmway has
mushroomed from a roadside stand in the late 1960s to a massive
farming operation that now includes the high-profile organic brands
Bunny-Luv and Cal-Organic, which started selling organic produce to
Whole Foods when both operations were fledgling, struggling
wannabes.
Once Whole Foods made it past the start-up phase, its deep pockets
and almost insatiable year-round appetite for organics helped
stabilize a turbulent market. And when expanding producers are
looking at an unexpected bumper crop of table-ready produce, they
can ask for help.
"It's a give-and-take relationship," says Stephen Poklemba of
Marfa, Texas-based Village Farms, which grows tomatoes in vast
hydroponic greenhouses in
Texas,
Pennsylvania, and
Mexico. "If
crops are overproducing and we need to move product, I can talk to
Whole Foods and they can do a push or get an ad put out to move
more of that product."