Way back when, in the Stone Age of natural foods retailing, most stores felt that it was important to articulate, even pontificate on, a set of product standards that would determine what they would and wouldn’t sell—and in the process, perhaps jab the conventional retailers with a stick of shame. “Guiding Principles,” as the standards were often called, were possibly the one thing your tiny health food store had that the massive Piggly Wiggly did not. These principles typically banned artificial flavors, colors, and preservatives; bleached and bromated flour; meat from animals routinely raised with antibiotics or growth hormones; and more. In other words, they banned most of the products that mainstream Americans ate. “We’ve read the labels, so you don’t have to,” natural food stores assured their customers. And in the scary world of DuPont’s “better living through chemistry,” in which no one really knew what those polysyllabic monstrosities on the labels even were, that was a pretty comforting thought.MORE: Is Your Fave Natural Food Made by a Megacorp? The original Queen of Product Standards was Sandy Gooch, a former schoolteacher who built Mrs. Gooch’s Natural Markets in California into the most admired and successful company of its kind from 1977 through the early ’90s. Since there was no official definition for organic in those days, let alone for natural (there still is not), Gooch wrote the rules herself—and she set the bar very, very high. Mrs. Gooch’s stores prohibited everything artificial, plus hydrogenated oils, refined sugar, isolated synthetic MSG, irradiated foods, and the “unmentionables” like alcohol and tobacco. They didn’t even allow caffeine or chocolate. And Mrs. Gooch’s was probably the first retailer in the world to ban genetically modified organisms at least a decade before the GMO issue hit anyone else’s radar screens. Other stores began copying Mrs. Gooch’s standards, and before long, manufacturers were being asked if their products were “Goochable.” If not, the manufacturers sometimes reformulated. Think about the boldness of her vision. In an industry that was all about commodity products, where everyone sold pretty much the same things, Sandy Gooch zagged when everyone else zigged. No Coke or Pepsi, whose promotional dollars often accounted for a huge portion of conventional supermarket profits. No Oreos, Hamburger Helper, or Swanson’s Hungry Man Dinners. Because none of the product staples that drove the enormous U.S. food industry met Sandy Gooch’s self-defined standards, they were all banned from her stores. Philosophy won the day. For a modern-day equivalent, imagine if a chain of gas stations decided it would not sell any petroleum products imported from the Middle East, or those that were derived from fracking. Would anyone take them seriously? Would anyone pay their exorbitant prices just to make a statement? Yet here we are, 38 years after Sandy Gooch went into business, 15 years into an entirely new millennium, and the notion of supermarket product standards is still a part of the DNA of most natural food stores. Take Jimbo’s, a 30-year-old, five-store chain in San Diego. It stocks only organic produce—a major restriction, given that only about 5% of the farmland in the US is certified organic. It also turns away products made with refined sugar, hydrogenated oils, or synthetic fragrances. In fact, Jimbo’s has a long list of standards prominently posted on its website, which closely echo (and update) the standards set down by Sandy Gooch long ago. Then there is Earth Fare, a chain based in Asheville, NC. Among other things, its “Food Philosophy” stipulates that none of its products can contain any of the usual no-no’s in health food land: no artificial flavors, colors, preservatives, or sweeteners; no bleached or bromated flour; and no products derived from animals given synthetic hormones. It also does away with high fructose corn syrup and synthetic trans fats. You can find some even more interesting Product Standards at PCC, the natural foods co-op in Seattle. It has standards for every department, including some rather esoteric ones like “no meat or dairy from cloned animals or their offspring” and “only eggs that are laid by cage-free hens on family-owned farms.” It’s not about the law—it’s the philosophy of the management and presumably its co-op members, too. One can almost hear Marge Simpson in the background, but whether it is her highly interested, upwardly intoned “ohhhhhhh!” or her disapproving downward “ohhhhhhh” is not clear. If you’d really like to take a trip into product-standard-geek heaven, check out the list of banned substances on the website of Maryland-based MOM’s Organic Market, which includes the fat substitute caprocaprylobehenin. Its customers are certainly activists—shopping at an independent health food chain in the backyard of the nation’s capitol—but do you suppose any of them know what caprocaprylobehenin is? They probably figure it’s eight syllables, and that’s about five too many, so ban it. Whole Foods is, of course, the king of clean, at least in popular consciousness—and indeed, it’s the literal inheritor of Sandy Gooch’s mantle, since it bought her stores in 1993. While purists might argue about Whole Foods’ decision to continue to sell conventional produce and products made with refined sugar, or lambaste it for its occasional slips of vigilance (for example, it sells a line of bakery products from Sweet Sam’s that contain the artificial additive polysorbate 60), the company has, in fact, blazed an innovative trail in new product standards in areas such as sustainable fisheries, humanely raised meats, and other categories. Its newest program is a science-based indexing of producer supplier transparency that rates produce and other items as “good,” “better” or “best” based on factors such as farmworker welfare, soil health, biodiversity, and water conservation. It’s unclear whether there is a demand for this yet, but it sure is impressive. In contrast, a new generation of “hybrid” retailers has now come on the scene with looser philosophies, or in some cases, with no formal product standards whatsoever. Among the former, New Seasons Market in Portland and Boulder-based Lucky’s come to mind. Lucky’s offers up some mushy language about how “food is the connection that ties us all together” and that it seeks out “sustainable and traditionally crafted foods made with purpose and pride.” But it makes no bones about selling popular national brands regardless of ingredients or loading up its vanilla tea cake with chemical shortcuts like propylene glycol. In the no-standards-at-all camp is Sprouts Farmers Market, the second largest pure-play natural foods chain in the country with about 200 stores, which, as it turns out, are not pure-play at all. Sprouts caters to the crossover crowd with things like electric-blue bulk gummy worms, nitrate-laden deli meats, and baked goods with ingredient lists seemingly written by Dostoyevsky. But it hasn’t stopped the chain from growing amazingly fast. The issue for Lucky’s and Sprouts, as for the nation’s largest conventional grocer, Kroger, which now sells more than a billion dollars a year of its Simple Truth lines of natural and organic foods, is that it’s impossible not to sound hypocritical if you list product standards for the foods in the natural foods department while offering “anything that will sell” in the very next aisle. Kroger does post a lengthy list of artificial ingredients that are not in its organic products. Of course, since the USDA has strict standards for use of the organic label, these compounds aren’t in anyone else’s organic products, either.MORE: Want the Next Natural Foods Trend? Get Ye to Piggly Wiggly. So perhaps we have entered into a new era, in which the consumer is wise enough, or facile enough with Google, to set her own standards. Conventional bananas are sprayed with ethylene gas to ripen them. Disodium phosphate adds thickness and stability to some Bolthouse Farm beverages. Erythritol is added to many products sweetened with stevia in order to mellow the aftertaste. Some natural meats come from animals that weren’t routinely treated with antibiotics or administered growth hormones, but may have been at some point in their lives. The chemical compound azodicarbonimide is often added to muffins and baked goods in the US to help bleach the flour or condition the dough—but it’s not allowed in the European Union. Are those adulterations acceptable to your store? If it’s Sprouts, then yes. If it’s Whole Foods, it depends. If it’s a smaller independent retailer, desperately invoking the spirit of Sandy Gooch in an effort to differentiate itself in a ridiculously competitive marketplace, then probably not. The onus, however, is no longer on the retailer. These days, the power has shifted to the consumer, but so has the responsibility. So when it comes to product standards, it’s caveat eat-or. Create your own food philosophy, and make sure to scour the labels—because the big label, the one on the outside of the store, is no longer sufficient.
