How Whole Foods Market Became a Shopping Phenomenon
By: Priscilla Indrayadi
Tags: Shopping, Analysis, Whole Foods, Culture, Whole Foods Market

Grocery shopping has never been more entertaining, and the idea of purchasing free-trade coffee beans and cruelty-free organic eggs is now more appealing than it ever was before. Almost everyone who lives in either America, Canada, or the United Kingdom must have heard of mega-chain supermarket Whole Foods Market. Originating from Austin, Texas in 1980, Whole Foods today claims to be “America’s Healthiest Grocery Store”.[1] Its main mission is to set excellent standards in the field of food retailers, valuing the quality of food, satisfaction of customers, team growth, all the while protecting the environment.[2] This essay will examine why grocery shopping at Whole Foods is appealing by looking at their core values, marketing strategy, and advertisements, as well as associating them with ideas of representation and the simulacra.

Without doubt, consumerism plays the biggest role in the long-lasting hype of Whole Foods. Whole Foods is an experienced economy, which means that customers shopping at Whole Foods are also buying the experience of it. Therefore, what drives the customers to keep returning is the atmosphere of the store and the impression that it leaves for the shoppers, no longer the products that they are actually selling. In reference to B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore’s book “Welcome to the Experience Economy”, “commodities are fungible, goods tangible, services intangible, and experiences memorable.” By using commodities, goods, and services together as a stage and prop, Pine and Gilmore suggest that it creates a memorable event, because economic offerings hold external values to the buyer, however, experiences personally engage towards each individual differently, whether it be emotional or intellectual,[3] and this adds more value for the company.

Prepared foods and salad bar section in Whole Foods Market, where one can customize their own meals (accessed from wholefoodsmarket.com).

Apart from this, not only does Whole Foods engage personally with their customers, they also engage the five human senses, which enhances and makes the experience more memorable. In each one of their stores, Whole Foods have sections where they sell fresh, ready to eat foods, along with fresh-from-the-oven bakery goods, with open-view kitchens to make sure that customers are able to see and hear the chefs in action. Whole Foods also sell all kinds of cuisines, ranging from Japanese to Italian, which accommodate to customers of different cultural cuisine preferences. In the prepared food section, customers are given the freedom to take however much warm foods that they wish, and they are allowed to mix and match their own salads. Additionally, they offer vegetarian and vegan options, which gives the positive impression that each customer is able to personalize their own foods and groceries. In other words, Whole Foods is selling the tangible and ephemeral; a sense of identity and lifestyle.

Essentially, this desired image of a person who values labor justice, environmental sustainability, and health consciousness is the identity. In Berger’s own words, “Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent,” signifying that the image could outlast what it represented, the same way an identity could outlast the image. The image is also a manifestation of how one appears to oneself and to others.[4] Additionally, Whole Foods attract customers who are conscious of their individuality and embraces this image. Evidently, based on data company Factual in 2018, customers who shop at Whole Foods are 154% more likely to earn more than $200,000, which is considered to be above the average annual salary in the United States. This highlights that in spite of the ideologies and values that are being promoted, shopping at Whole Foods has become a mechanism which legitimatizes the financial and racial hierarchies in modern society. As validation, Josée Johnston and Michelle Szabo studied Whole Foods’s customers by interviewing a number of them in Toronto. They have written that the majority of their interviewees were “affluent, educated, and White”, highlighting that although their household incomes vary, they generally fall above average in terms of social standing.

Furthermore, Whole Foods have a way with words. Throughout the grocery store, phrases like “Supporting organic farmers since 1980”, and “We seek out & promote organically grown foods” are printed largely,[5] constantly reminding the shoppers of the core values that they are encouraging. Apart from this, the company’s motto is “Whole Foods, Whole People, Whole Planet”[6] which is suggesting the customers that by purchasing fair-trade and organic products, buyers are essentially able to feel “whole” and make their environment better, and this is further emphasized through their use of advertisement. With the help of advertisements, customers are completely seduced by the image of an ethical and healthy lifestyle. In this case, it is not service or goods that sells more when it comes to Whole Foods, but it is rather the image that makes the most profit.

Inside a Whole Foods Market store in Kensington, London, showing its phrases placed around the store (accessed from https://www.timeout.com/london/shopping/whole-foods-market)

Whole Foods advertisement (accessed from adage.com).

In reference to John Berger’s idea that seeing comes before words,[7] visual advertising is fundamental in presenting the values and images that Whole Foods are portraying. In Figure 3, an image of neat rows of a paddy field, with a farmer in the center of the ad and the caption “The highest standards weren’t available, so we created them.” This advertisement displays Whole Foods supposed values of supporting local producers and selecting only the highest quality groceries. However, it is important to realize that the advertisement is not showing images of the products that are sold, instead it is displaying the image that Whole Foods’s organic produces come straight from the clean fields in farms, and that Whole Foods is superior when it comes to the quality of foods. Therefore, viewers are seduced only by the image of an ethical and healthy lifestyle, which shopping at Whole Foods contributes to, resulting to being drawn to a “simulated” version of reality, or as Jean Baudrillard claims, a state of hyperreality.[8]

According to Baudrillard, a hyperreality is defined as “the meticulous reduplication of the real, through another reproductive medium, such as in photography,” which emphasizes on the significance of advertisements and media. Hyperrealism is the “reality for its own sake” which fetishizes what is lost.[9] Baudrillard also writes that reality is often replaced by hyperreality, in which the ideas of the real is no longer signified, and only the simulacrum is signified. Simulacrum, in this case, is the “image, representation, or a reproduction of the concrete other.”[10] Thus, this virtual and hyper-realistic simulacra is Whole Foods’s marketing strategy which enforces the social identity that is being sold.

Additionally, the strategy is enhanced and manifested in how the products are presented. For instance, most will find Whole Foods’s butchers having bloodless aprons, which gives the impression that they have clean work stations, in turn creating the image of cleaner meats. In Johnston and Szabo’s study, they have found that cleanliness and tidiness are significant reasons why customers prefer Whole Foods as opposed to other grocery stores.[11] Nonetheless, the butcher’s bloodless station disconnects the customers from the violent nature of butchering meat itself, because then it would make customers feel uneasy and ironically, self-conscious of the brutality. Supporting this, interviewees have said that shopping at Whole Foods is comfortable, and that the store itself is aesthetically pleasing.[12] Therefore, natural and organic products are sold for the image opposing its reality, as dirt is a feature of nature itself. This indicates the very fact of the simulacra, and that the customers are living in a hyperreality, as some customers have even said that going to Whole Foods has become a sort of “escape” from the hustle and bustle of daily life, or perhaps as a distraction from reality.

Although it seems that only the simulacra of identity is operating in Whole Foods, there are plenty that manage with one another. Whole Foods’s advertisement, website, social media, and stores function alongside the simulacrum. These simulacrum work in the way that it transforms what is real into the desired hyperreality, as well as contributing to the Experience Economy. In this case, customers do not even need to enter the store to experience what they are selling, which is not the supposedly organic products, but rather the identity and the image that is tied to the products. The long-lasting sensation built from Whole Foods can be explained profoundly using concepts of the Experience Economy, the notion of image and representation, as well as Baudrillard’s simulacrum and hyperreality. With this, although it might seem that Whole Foods’ main business is only to sell organic and natural product, with deeper insight, an image of a desired social identity can also be seen lying behind it.

NOTES:

[1] “Company Info,” Whole Foods Market, https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/company-info

[2] “Our Core Values,” Whole Foods Market, https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/mission-values/core-values

[3] B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore, Welcome to the Experience Economy, Harvard Business Review Press, 1998.

[4] John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 2008): 10

[5] “Whole Foods Market,” TimeOut, 26 October, 2016.

[6] Pauline Meyer, “Whole Foods Market’s Vision Statement, Mission Statement,” Panmore Institute, 31 January, 2017.

[7] John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 2008): 7.

[8] Ryszard W. Wolny, “Hyperreality and Simulacrum: Jean Baudrillard and European Postmodernism,” European Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 3, no. 3 (2017): 76

[9] Jean Baudrillard, “The Hyper-realism of Simulation” in Art in Theory 1900–2000, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Wiley-Blackwell, 2003: 1018.

[10] Wolny, “Hyperreality and Simulacrum: Jean Baudrillard and European Postmodernism,” 77.

[11] Joseé Johnston, and Michelle Szabo. “Reflexivity and the Whole Foods Market Consumer: The Lived Experience of Shopping for Change.” Agriculture and Human Values 28, no. 3 (2011): 306–307.