Business news outlets were abuzz recently as Whole Foods Market announced its plans to open a new, lower-priced, “curated” chain of grocery stores just for wallet-watching millennial customers who balk at the high prices of its original “Whole Paycheck” stores.
The new format will likely appeal in particular to younger shoppers who are attracted to Whole Foods’ social and ethical ethos but turned off by the price of the high-end food,” Neil Saunders, CEO of retail consultancy Conlumino, told USA Today. “[Whole Foods] still has a problem on price. [Millennials] just don’t have the disposable income to make that their destination of choice for grocery shopping.”
Studies from the Center for Culinary Development show a generational concern for knowing exactly what’s in food, where it’s from, and how it’s produced. Established food brands are having to radically alter their image and offerings in order to keep pace, while demand for humanely sourced food is affecting the supply chain — all the way back down to the bottom of the chain again.
Whole Foods’ announcement comes on the back of our recent reporting on "Why Companies Need More Millennials on Their Boards" that McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, both of whom are struggling to adapt their brands to the transparent supply chain and health-conscious needs of millennial consumers, will be making changes to their product offerings in order to win back millennials.
“We are well aware of the [millennial] consumer distrust of big food,” Campbell Soup CEO Denise Morrison said after the company reported lower sales and profits in its second fiscal quarter. Campbell is scrambling as consumers eschew processed and packaged foods. This year, it debuted a line of six organic soups, and under its Bolthouse brand released a line of shelf-stable cold-pressed juices. The distance from condensed cream of mushroom soup to coconut water and coriander is a long way to travel.
This millennial-driven movement is causing product reinvention from some of America’s stalwart brands, veteran food industry writer Sarah McColl writers this week for TakePart. In her piece, “From the Drive-Through to the Pasture, Millennials Are Changing the Way We Eat,” McColl reports not only on the way that big food chains and grocery stores are responding to the increasingly health-conscious needs of millennials, but how millennials themselves are heavily participating on the side of farm and supply-chain “startups” in record numbers.
“Since the Farm Service Agency’s inception of its microloan program in January 2013, 70 percent of the $161 million in loan dollars has gone to beginning farmers,” McColl writes. And there’s free money, too: The USDA announced in February 39 grants totaling more than $18 million to encourage urban farming in low-income and underserved communities.
April Lane is a freelance writer.