The jolly green giant
Alex Bilmes visits the US organic superstore coming to Kensington Ibumped into my friend Katie in Whole Foods Market in West Hollywood the other day. Katie embodies all the qualities of the quintessentially upmarket California girl — pretty, privileged, clean living, almost offensively content. She lives in Pacific Palisades with her fantastically successful (by which I mean rich) lawyer husband, and was here to pick up some tubs of organic baby milk for her new brood. No surprise to me that on my first visit to a West Coast branch of this awesomely successful organic supermarket chain, shortly to colonise the UK with a London megastore, I should find Katie cruising the aisles, sunglasses on head, red Amex card in purse.
Isn’t it really expensive, I asked her, doing all the family food shopping here? ‘You know me, honey,’ she shot back. ‘I don’t look at prices.’ The West Hollywood Whole Foods sits on the corner of Santa Monica and Fairfax, part of a strip mall that also includes the Stolichnaya Bakery and a Kung Pao Bistro. As I made my approach I was hailed by a strikingly attractive Greenpeace representative who’d set up shop beneath a car park palm tree. She was collecting signatures for a petition to ‘defend our oceans’.
Inside, the well-heeled hippy overtones continued. A notice at the entrance advertised an on-site exhibition of Huichol Indian art — ‘the Huichols say there is a mirror between our hearts and everything in the universe’ — which I can’t imagine going down too well at my local Morrisons. Further in, a ‘customer communications board’ displayed comments from shoppers. From Liam: ‘I enjoy the salad bar here every day, and it’s pretty awesome. But lately the red bell peppers have been cut into huge wedges instead of being diced.’ Close by, a portly middle-aged man was having his back rubbed in the massage therapy area.
Silly gimmickry aside, the first thing that strikes the British shopper about Whole Foods Market — or Whole F***ing Paycheck, as New York friends have been calling it for years — is the phenomenal abundance of the place. American supermarkets have long been synonymous with plenty, of course, and even a Wal-Mart can make those of us more accustomed to Tesco Metro feel like Brezhnev-era Muscovites, such is the cornucopia of fresh food on offer.
But Whole Foods Market really takes the gluten-free oatcake. In the fruit and veg section I marvelled at the meridol papaya, fondled the cherimoya and the cilantro, sniffed at the burdock root and the kabocha squash. At the butchery I gazed admiringly at the ‘humanely raised’ meat, all proudly displaying its specific provenance, right down to the farmer’s shoe size and his first wife’s maiden name. I walked down aisle after aisle of vitamin bottles, powdered diet substitutes and multicoloured bottles of elixirs. Everywhere the sheer choice of products on offer seemed overwhelming. It might be expensive — correction, it is expensive — but my God, it beats Sainsbury’s Local.
Whole Foods Market was founded in Austin, Texas, in 1980, by a charismatic former hippy and committed vegan called John Mackey, who is now chairman and CEO of a public company that owns 195 separate stores in America, from Alabama to Wisconsin, employs over 40,000 staff, or ‘team members’, and had sales of $5.6 billion in 2006. It is expanding fast, with 80 new supermarkets underway, and a stated aim to achieve annual revenue of £12 billion by 2010.
In January 2004, Whole Foods bought the UK’s seven Fresh & Wild stores for £21 million, and it has been stealthily re-branding those locations while working on its masterpiece, the world’s biggest organic supermarket, which will open in June in the once stately department store, Barkers, on Kensington High Street.
Whole Foods Market Kensington will occupy 80,000 square feet over three floors, and the company projects that it will serve a customer every four seconds. There will be an in-house yoga studio, an oyster bar, cookery classes and a sushi and sake counter. Home delivery will be by bicycle, with the cyclist towing a solar-powered fridge. No news yet on whether he’ll be wearing a wind-turbine on his baseball cap.
The key, according to the marketing, is the nosh: Whole Foods Market claims to sell only food that is free from artificial flavours, colours, sweeteners, preservatives and hydrogenated fats. It also makes a virtue of its determination to source as many products as possible from local growers and manufacturers — a laudable aim, and one wishes it luck finding naturally occurring cherimoya in W8.
The other USP, naturally, is the seductive sense of sanctimony: the eco-friendly carrier bags, the fair-trade coffee beans, the commitments to ethical consumerism, animal rights and corporate transparency. But one suspects that what will really attract the west London well-to-do away from Waitrose is the almost pornographic decadence of the place, the delicious temptations of a temple to elitist consumerism wrapped up in muesli, fragranced with trans-fat-free freshly baked bread and spritzed with antioxidant pomegranate juice.
Back on Santa Monica, I asked Katie if she thought Whole Foods would take off in England. ‘Oh, sure,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know, sweetie. I think it’s kind of played out here. I usually go to Trader Joe’s now. It’s kind of more downhome, you know?’ I don’t know, really. But I’m sure we’ll all find out eventually. Perhaps they’ll turn Peter Jones into one.
www.wholefoods.com
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