why walmart can't fix the food systerm

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Copyright © February 2012 by Food & Water Watch.

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Why Walmart Cant Fix the Food System

1

Walmart is the biggest company in the United States

and the country’s largest food retailer.1 Walmart is

so big that it has an unprecedented amount of powerin all sectors of the economy. Food is no exception.

When there is one player this large connecting food

producers and food consumers, consumers are no

longer the food industry’s customers — Walmart is.

And the saying “the customer is always right” has

never been more appropriate.

Walmart is such a large customer that even large food

processors cannot refuse any demands that Walmart

makes upon them. The company’s model is based on

practices that drive consolidation; take money away

from farmers, workers and processors; and drive

agriculture to get more industrialized.

Walmart’s business model is part of the problem,

which means the company is not going to be a mean-

ingful part of the solution to problems in the food

supply. Instead of succumbing to Walmart’s public

relations o ensive and pressure to be allowed in new

urban areas, all levels of government should look for

other solutions to increase communities’ access to

healthy food.



2 Food & Water Watch

What started as a single discount store in Rogers, Arkansas, in 19622 has over the last 50 years morphed

into the largest retailer in the world.3 Walmart is

the biggest company in the United States and the

country’s largest food retailer.4 Walmart is the world’s

largest private employer, with 2.1 million employees,

1.4 million of whom are in the United States.5

Walmart has almost 4,000 (3,804) U.S. stores and over

4,500 (4,557) stores internationally in 14 countries.6

Walmart’s 2010 sales were $419 billion,7 with the

company making $1.87 million in prot every hour.8

Walmart opened its rst “supercenter” in 1988 in the

town of Washington, Missouri, selling food alongside

other retail products, and within only 12 years became

the largest food retailer in the United States.16 Now

just over half of Walmart’s business comes from

grocery sales.17 One out of every three dollars spent on

groceries in this country goes to Walmart.18

Walmart is so big that it has an unprecedented

amount of power in all sectors of the economy. Food

is no exception. When there is one player this large

connecting food producers and food consumers,

consumers are no longer the food industry’s customers

— Walmart is. And the saying “the customer is always

right” has never been more appropriate.

The company continually puts downward pressure on

its suppliers, forcing them to cut costs. With Walmart

as their biggest customer, suppliers have no choice but

to comply. When Walmart makes a decision to change

the way it does business, an entire industry will shiftto keep up. And despite what Walmart would have

the public believe, this decision is made with prots

in mind. As consumers and policymakers continue

to be bombarded with PR messages about Walmart’s

e orts to help people live better, it is time to look at

the impact that Walmart’s rise has had on our food

system — and to reconsider whether the Walmart

model has any place in trying to x it.

93,804 4,557

10

700,000

11

12

13

14

29

15

PHOTO BY JUSTIN COZART / COMMONS.WIKIMEDIA.ORG




3

More than just size and market share have enabled

Walmart to exercise such considerable control over

suppliers. Walmart’s success is the result of several

very specic factors about the way the company does

business. In addition to being fervently anti-union,19

Walmart’s logistics and distribution model is much

di erent from other companies. The primary reason

for Walmart’s incredible growth as a food retailer is

because of its model for managing the supply chain.20

Essentially, Walmart’s model boils down to sucking

money out of the supply chain.

Walmart bases its logistical operations on shifting

costs and responsibilities to suppliers. Walmart

requires suppliers to adopt supply chain manage-

ment, logistics, and data-sharing programs and tomanage their own inventory, even on store shelves.21

Walmart was the rst to bring high-tech information

management into the grocery industry and demanded

that its suppliers comply with and use the company’s

own information technology system, which includes

automated, scheduled delivery of products and control

of inventory, tracked electronically via universal bar

code.22 Keeping track of this is the responsibility of the

supplier, not Walmart. The company even exercises

control over the design of products, forcing suppliers

to meet Walmart specications.23

Supplier Pressure

Contracts with Walmart are non-negotiable as a rule: if

suppliers want to do business with the world’s largest

retailer, they must accept Walmart’s terms without

modication.24 Walmart has set up its operations with

suppliers to allow the company to shift liability for

setting prices, supply and distribution to the producer,

with no risk to Walmart. If there are perceived discrep-

ancies with an order, or even if not enough product is

sold, Walmart can charge the supplier a ne, known

as a “chargeback.”25 These chargeback fees, which

have since become more common in other retail indus-

tries as well, can be signicant — sometimes in the

hundreds of thousands of dollars.26

When Walmart rst began to require some suppliers

to use radio-frequency identication tags, or RFID

tags, to keep track of inventory, it required those

suppliers to pay all of the costs of the technology.27

RFID tags send out a weak radio signal that allows

the item to be scanned and tracked from a distance.28

The technology was originally used to track pallets in

warehouses but has expanded to some clothing and

food items as well, including use on farms.29

One estimate of the cost of adopting RFID technology

for a grocery manufacturer with $5 billion in sales

was about $33 million per year.30 The cumulative

savings for Walmart for putting this cost on its

suppliers would amount to billions of dollars.31 While

it has not required these tags on every product,

Walmart has forced suppliers who did not adopt the

technology to pay fees for untagged goods.32

High-Volume Demand

Walmart sells an incredible amount of each food

product, much more so than a small or medium-

sized producer could ever hope to supply on its own.

For instance, Walmart buys 1 billion pounds of beef

each year.33 For a company obsessed with increasing

e iciencies in its supply chain, it makes consider-




ably more sense for Walmart to get meat from a few

large meatpackers than from numerous small, local

suppliers. In addition, these smaller producers are

probably less likely to be able to meet and a ord

Walmart’s technological requirements for managing

inventory, unlike the bigger players in the industry.

Organic Valley, a farmer-owned cooperative that

supplied Walmart with organic milk for approximatelyfour years, was selling 1.3 million gallons of uid milk

to Walmart each year.34 Yet this represented only 3.6

percent of Walmart’s total milk sales for that year.35

After an organic milk shortage left the company

unable to supply all of its customers, Organic Valley

decided it would no longer sell milk to Walmart.36

Organic Valley executives feared that Walmart would

purchase so much of the cooperative’s milk that

Organic Valley would become beholden to the retail

giant and could be pressured to lower prices and thuspay its dairy farmers less, something it did not wish

to do.37 Rather than become so dependent on Walmart

that it would make the cooperative vulnerable,

Organic Valley stopped supplying milk to Walmart.

Buyer Power

Walmart is the largest purchaser of American agri-

cultural products,38 and as such it has considerable

inuence over which foods are available to the public,

the methods in which these foods are produced, and

the prices paid to producers.

The incredibly uneven power dynamic between

Walmart and its manufactured goods suppliers is well

known.39 It puts Walmart into an excellent position

to make demands on these suppliers, and Walmart

regularly does. The pressure to cut costs that has

pushed companies like Levi’s, Hu y, Rubbermaid, Mr.Co ee and RCA to close up manufacturing facilities in

the United States and move them overseas40 has also

hurt food producers like Vlasic, which was at one time

making less than one cent per jar of pickles in order to

meet Walmart’s price-point demands.41 This pressure

travels all the way down the food chain and has led to

increased consolidation in the food industry.

Walmart is now the biggest customer for many

of the top food producers and processors in the

country, including dairy giant Dean Foods, General

Mills, Kraft Foods and Tyson Foods.42 Each of these

suppliers represents only a very small portion of

Walmart’s total business, but the relationship is a

great deal more important to the supplier because

food processors, meat packers and other suppliers

cannot sacrice their sales to major retailers, but the

retailers can easily switch to alternative suppliers.43

Walmart is such a large customer that even large food

dont talk

publicly about their experiences supplying

Walmart, the story of Vlasic pickles should

industry. In the late 1990s, Walmart noted in

its own sales tests that a gallon jar of Vlasic

pickles priced at $3 sold extremely well, so

the company asked Vlasic to allow gallon

jars to be priced at $2.97 at every one of its stores.44 Walmart used this as a state-

ment item to show the public it had low

prices.45 This made Vlasic only one penny

per jar, if that, but sold tremendously well,

even causing consumers to stop buying the

dropped 25 percent.46




5

processors cannot refuse any demands that Walmart

makes upon them.

In order to compete with Walmart, other grocery

stores in the industry have tried to emulate the

company’s practices, becoming bigger, consolidating

operations and putting downward price pressure

on their suppliers and workers. This industry-wide

pressure means rising consolidation in the entire food

chain, all to keep up with Walmart.

Since Walmart moved into grocery sales in the late

1990s, many other retailers have also consolidated

their operations to try to compete. This consolidation

across the grocery industry has given the largest

retailers considerable power as buyers of groceries,

and has also signicantly reduced the number of

buyers of products from regional food producers.

Supermarket chains are now very concentrated, with

half of all sales going to just four companies.47 At

the local level, the top four chains can control more

than 70 percent of the marketplace.48 Walmart alone

controls more than 50 percent of the grocery market

in 29 markets across the country.49

These retailers with high market share can exert

this power over food manufacturers, meat processors,

produce shippers and other suppliers to reduce their

prices. This buyer power favors the largest suppliers,

who can best negotiate with the large retailers and

who then pass on the cost-cutting pressure to the

farms and ranches they buy from. Large retailers can

represent between 10 and 30 percent of a supplier’s

sales, which gives the retailer signicant bargaining

power.50

The phrase “get big or get out” has been used for

decades to describe the pressure on farmers to grow

larger in order to survive increasingly consolidatedmarkets. And the phrase could be used to describe

the pressure on food processors as well. Many food

processing rms justify their own mergers as an e ort

to create stronger bargaining power to use with large

food retailers like Walmart.51 Even as large suppliers

merge to increase their power with large retail buyers

smaller food processors and manufacturers may exit

the industry after determining they cannot get fair

prices from the major buyers.52

Walmart’s approximately 3,800 stores in the U.S. are

located predominantly in rural and suburban areas,

but the company is determined to move into urban

markets.53 Walmart saw same-store sales (sales at

stores that existed in the prior year) decline for nine

straight quarters from 2009 to the second quarter of

2011.54 Customers were no longer spending as much




money at Walmart as they used to.55 In order for the

company to continue to increase its overall sales and

satisfy shareholders, Walmart must instead open new

stores. The company has estimated that there are

billions of dollars in new sales waiting for it in urban

areas. So why hasn’t the company already opened

stores in cities?

Walmart has made numerous attempts to expand

into cities but has been met with intense opposition,

having its e

orts rebu

ed in New York, Los Angelesand, until 2006, Chicago.56 Walmart’s failure to break

into urban markets is due to organized opposition

on the part of citizen and community groups who

have seen that allowing a Walmart into a community

brings with it low-paying jobs with few benets, and

furthers a cycle of poverty. The company’s treat-

ment of workers, suppliers and local communities is

well known, and across the country, what were once

vibrant downtowns made up of local businesses have

become ghost towns after the opening of a Walmart.57

Many urban communities have organized to try to

stop Walmart from entering their city to try to avoid

this fate.58

Walmart’s impact on workers, rural towns, main

streets and the environment has been documented

in countless books, articles and campaigns by labor

unions and other advocates. The company knows it has

an image problem, going so far as hiring consultants,

doing studies and running ads to try to repair it.59 As

part of its e orts to overcome opposition to its attempts

to enter new markets, the company has unleashed

numerous announcements about new initiatives to

improve its environmental performance, social respon-

sibility or long-term sustainability. After years of

trying to reinvent its image, the company has latched

on to food as the issue that will cast Walmart as a solu-

tion instead of a problem. And when it comes to food,

the company is getting some very high-prole help.

Bringing Healthy Food to Food Deserts

Walmart has found a new public relations angle that

it can use to wedge its way into cities. In early 2010,

First Lady Michelle Obama announced her newcampaign, Let’s Move! This campaign had the admi-

rable goal of solving childhood obesity in the United

States within a generation.60 However, it quickly

became clear that this campaign would also be used to

advance the urban-expansion agenda of Walmart.

In January 2011, First Lady Obama partnered with

Walmart as part of the Let’s Move! campaign. This

partnership included not only a commitment on

Walmart’s part for minor reductions in sodium and

sugar levels in some of its products by 2015, butalso an announcement that it would open up new

stores in so called “food deserts.”61 Walmart created

its own nutritional denitions for what it considers

“healthier” — denitions that are, according to nutri-

tionist Marion Nestle, “not particularly challenging.”62

The U.S. Department of Agriculture denes “food

desert” not simply as a lower-income area with no

access to fresh food, but as an area without access to

a supermarket or large grocery store.63 A supermarket

is dened as a retailer with annual sales of $2 million,

and it must contain all the traditional major food

departments, including fresh meat and produce, dairy

products, dry and packaged goods, and frozen foods.64

This requirement can generally be met only by large

national grocery chains. A smaller local grocery co-op,

corner store or bodega, which may in fact provide

fresh fruits and vegetables as well as cycle more

PHOTO BY MATT H. WADE / COMMONS.WIKIMEDIA.ORG




7

money back into the community, does not count under

the USDA guideline, a fault that the department is

well aware of.65 This corporate-friendly denition

makes sure only the opening of a large national

grocery chain can eliminate a food desert, a situation

that Walmart is using to its advantage.

In July 2011, First Lady Obama made a second state-

ment on behalf of Walmart and other large retailerswhen she announced that Walmart was making an

o icial commitment to open up or expand 275 to 300

stores in underserved urban and rural areas.66 To the

general public, this sounds like a solution that helps

everyone: low-income populations in urban and rural

areas will be able to obtain lower-cost, healthy and

fresh foods that they did not previously have access to.

But this talk of supplying good food in “food deserts”

is simply a public relations tactic that Walmart is

using to try to expand into urban markets, an area ithas unsuccessfully tried to break in to for years.

The lack of access to healthy food in many communi-

ties is too complex to solve simply with the siting of

a big-box store. Providing a place to buy fruits and

vegetables is one step, but we must also consider the

long-term reforms needed to ensure that the system

providing those fruits and vegetables is sustainable

for everyone at every stage of production.

Walmart’s model for supplying the fruits andvegetables it will sell in food deserts is part of the

problem. By driving down costs at every step in

the chain, the Walmart model makes farmers and

workers poorer, and it increases the odds that fruits

and vegetables will be produced in environmentally

irresponsible ways or be imported from countries with

lax standards. This comes on top of the burden borne

by Walmart’s employees who are paid poorly with

few benets. Cheap fruits and vegetables might look

good on paper, but it is not so simple when costs to

employees, workers throughout the food supply chain,

and the environment are left out of the equation.

Walmart announced in October 2010 that it would

be buying more “locally grown” produce. When

most consumers think of buying local, they imagine

smaller-scale, diverse farms operated by families.

But Walmart is not increasing its purchasing of local

produce in order to help farmers. Instead, this is a

business decision designed to help its image while

increasing e iciencies and cost savings.67 One way the

company benets is by spending less money on fuel

by acquiring produce from the same state and cutting

down on food that is spoiled or damaged in transit

across the country.68

But because Walmart deals in volume — not by buying

small lots from numerous farms — buying localdoesn’t necessarily translate to supporting the types

of agriculture consumers might imagine. Walmart’s




distribution and logistics model favors the use of very

few suppliers, and fresh produce is no exception.

Walmart’s actual goal for local food is minimal: while

Walmart wants to double the amount of locally grown

produce it sells by 2015, this would only increase what

Walmart denes as locally grown to 9 percent of its

produce sales, a goal it estimates will take four years

to achieve.69

Walmart’s denition of “local” is broad: obtained

within the same state as the store.70 And the goal

is not 9 percent of products sold in each store, but

a combined 9 percent of the produce of all stores.71

This means that stores already located in major

agricultural states like California, Texas or Florida

can easily make up for the lack of same-state produce

in other states. In larger states like California

and Texas, so-called “local” food could be traveling

hundreds of miles, greater than the distance between

Richmond, Virginia, and Portland, Maine.

Walmart has also made a move into organic food,

announcing in 2006 that it would double the number

of organic products on its shelves.72 Walmart made

this decision in an attempt to attract wealthier

consumers and to help its image.73 However, the

Walmart way of doing business is having negative

repercussions in the organic industry, as it has in the

rest of the food industry.

When Walmart talks about organic, it is di erent

from what many consumers expect. It includes

big food companies making organic versions of

the processed foods that are already on Walmart’s

shelves — like Rice Krispies and Kraft macaroni and

cheese, which these companies can make organic by

replacing high-fructose corn syrup with cane sugarand removing or substituting preservatives or other

ingredients.74 There is little evidence that Walmart is

concerned about the principles behind organic agri-

culture, and it will likely accept the bare-minimum

requirements for ensuring that a product ts USDA’s

organic labeling requirements. An executive in charge

of perishable food at Walmart admitted that the move

into organics is simply a merchandising scheme, and

that “organic agriculture is just another method of

agriculture — not better, not worse.”75

When Organic Valley was considering ending its

supplier agreement with Walmart, dairy giant Dean

Foods was waiting to get in line. Dean’s Horizon

Organic milk brand was willing to o er lowball

prices to Walmart, prices so low that Organic Valley

could not begin to compete. The company knew that

Walmart was only interested in price, not whether the

dairy farmers could make a living.76 Dean Foods is

now a supplier of organic milk to Walmart.77

Walmart’s own private-label organic milk brand has

been harshly criticized. The dairy cows are raised

in factory-farm conditions, with thousands of cows

housed in a single facility.78 The cows eat predomi-

nately grain and are grass fed only while they are not

being milked — about two to three months out of the

year.79 Whole Foods Market executives toured one of

the facilities in 2006 and found it “unacceptable.”80




9

Walmart’s priority when it comes to organic products

is nding the cheaper product, rather than meeting

any principles of organic agriculture.81 Walmart’s

continued expansion into organics will favor those

large suppliers that use factory-farm methods to

produce their products as cheaply as possible, poten-

tially pushing out of business smaller-scale, organic

producers who could not otherwise compete on price

or volume.

Sustainability

In 2005, during a low point in the company’s public

image,82 Walmart announced it was going “green,”83

and in 2006 the company listed three goals it would

try to achieve over the coming years: creating zero

waste, using 100-percent renewable energy and

selling more “ecofriendly” products.

84

Since that time,Walmart has announced numerous initiatives in

an e ort to cut energy costs and waste, all to make

the company run more e iciently. The company also

obtained the positive image benets of these decisions

and won over many of its critics.85

By di using criticism, the company is able to expand

unopposed into more markets. Walmart executives

do not see the sustainability goals as a form of

philanthropy, but as a growth strategy.86 Walmart

has clearly stated that “going green” is simply aboutcutting costs and saving money.87 Former CEO Lee

Scott noted that the rationale for these initiatives was

purely economic, stating, “what Wal-Mart has done

is approach this from a business stand point and not

from a point of altruism.”88

Walmart is the largest private consumer of elec-

tricity in the United States,89 so any reductions in

electricity usage mean big savings for the company.

While Walmart claims it wants to be more reliant on

renewable energy, it has also stated it will not use

renewable energy if it is more costly than traditional

sources.90 This is Walmart’s line in the sand: once

“sustainability” becomes unprotable for the company,

it will stop using it as a criteria in its decisions.

In the meantime, the company has not made much

progress in meeting its sustainability goals.91 As part

of the waste-reduction goal, Walmart has demanded

that suppliers reduce the amount of packaging they

use in their products.92 What on the surface seems

like a decent step is really one more change Walmart

pushes on its suppliers that has little positive benet

for the environment and a big benet for Walmart’s

bottom line. The ultimate goal for cutting packaging is

a meager 5 percent reduction across the supply chain

by 2013.93 But even this minor reduction allows the

company to t more products into a container, boat

or truck, which means less money Walmart spends

on shipping.94 As a Walmart executive pointed out, “a

2% reduction in a package’s size is worth millions and

millions of dollars.”95

In 2010, Walmart made yet another demand of its

suppliers in the name of “sustainability,” asking them

to analyze the carbon lifecycles of their products and

then try to reduce their energy use.96 Suppliers must

pay all the costs associated with meeting this goal,while Walmart gets to claim credit for the results.97

And while this program is not mandatory, Walmart

has made it clear that it only wants to do business

with companies that share its goals.98 The message to

suppliers is clear: either get with the program or lose

your biggest customer.

As Walmart looks for new markets, especially urban

ones, the company has embarked on an ambitiouspublic relations campaign to convince skeptical local

governments and communities that Walmart makes




peoples’ lives better. Food has become a cornerstone of

the company’s public relations o ensive. However, the

reality of what Walmart has done to change peoples’

access to food, improve nutrition or expand organics

does not live up to the company’s hype.

Walmart’s model is based on practices that drive

consolidation; take money away from farmers,

workers, and processors; and drive agriculture to getmore industrialized. Walmart’s model is part of the

problem, which means the company is not going to be

a meaningful part of the solution to shortcomings in

the modern-day food supply. Instead of succumbing

to Walmart’s public relations campaign and pressure

to be allowed in new urban areas, local governments

should look for other solutions to increase communi-

ties’ access to healthy food.

The federal government can make that easier for

communities by:

Investigating the impact of Walmart’s monopoly

power in the food chain and in local retail markets,

including anticompetitive practices that result

from Walmart’s disproportionate market share.

Any investigation should look at possible anticom-

petitive practices in Walmart’s relationships with

suppliers and impacts on local markets.

Creating food and farm policy that re-establishes

regional food systems that will provide healthy,

a ordable food to all communities. Federal farmpolicy should strengthen food assistance programs

that ght hunger and improve nutrition such as

the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

(SNAP) and the Women, Infants, and Children

Supplemental Nutrition Program to ensure that

low-income Americans have the resources neces-

sary to a ord healthy, nutritious foods and prevent

hunger. Additional policy solutions can also

include SNAP incentives to promote purchasing

of healthy foods such as fruits and vegetables andwhole grains, and expanding Electronic Benet

Transfer (EBT) availability at farmers markets

and other community venues.




11

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81

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June 4, 2011.

84 Roberts, Stacey. Wal-Mart shows its energy-saving side.

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85 Hsu (June 4, 2011).

86

87

88 LaMonica (April 12, 2010).

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90 Schmit, Julie. Wal-Mart raises bar on going green. . September 20

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91 Mui, Ylan Q. At Wal-Mart, green has various shades. .

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ber 25, 2006.

93 Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. [Press release.] Wal-Mart Unveils Packaging Scorecard

to Suppliers. November 1, 2006.

95

96 Rosenbloom, Stephanie. Wal-Mart plans to make its supply chain greener.

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97

98



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